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How to Name Your Music Project (And Not Regret It Later)

Making a great song is obviously the best marketing tool, but one thing that can help it spread—or discourage it from spreading—is having a great name to promote your music under.

My favorite band is The 1975, and I did a full-body cringe over having to like a band whose name was that corny. But eventually I was won over and now walk around town in their merch. The inverse is also true. The right name can create curiosity. The first time I heard "And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead," I thought, "I gotta hear what that sounds like." They got me as a fan for years, who bought a lot of their stuff out of that initial curiosity.

This is the most requested topic I get, but I know it's going to make my life hell. I've spent 20 years debating this subject with people, and it makes them so angry. If I make any point about their name being flawed, they have so much hard work embedded in that name that they lash out when confronted with a bad decision. So if you've already named your music project and are worried it may be flawed, please take three deep breaths before reading this. And 30 deep breaths before you flame me in my YouTube comments, because trust me—I've been roasting people in the chat since 1994 and you don't want to step to this internet tough guy's dunks.

Why a Good Name Actually Matters

It really sucks to change your name. Trying to spread the news that your name changed is hell. Switching over Spotify profiles or social media can be a nightmare of the biggest proportions. The key is we only want to do this one time and name yourself properly the first time.

Enjoying this? Forward it to a music friend you’d like to be closer to and start a discussion!

If you ask anyone who was in a popular band and then had to do something new, ask them how easy they thought it was going to be, and then how much it sucked to switch that name over. It's not fun. We want to take it seriously that you get this as right as possible before you have to tell a lot of people your name changed and lose a ton of the progress you already worked for.

What Actually Goes Into a Good Name

I asked my friends in our Facebook group (link below if you want to join the best community discussing music promotion), and it reaffirmed what I've been saying about this subject for as long as I can remember.

What matters most is that your name emotionally matches your sound. It'd be really weird to name your Playboy Carti-type rapping self "The Inquisitive One" when you're just going to spout a bunch of ridiculous, ignorant stuff. Or take death metal—we have to consider that every set of words or combination of them has some sort of emotional imagery that brings something to mind in most people's eyes. It tends to help the lure of your music if they work in harmony with the emotion the music makes.

There are ways to go outside this. I don't think anyone had any idea what Blink-182 sounded like unless someone gave them a hint before they got popular, and people heard what they sounded like. But conversely, there's some immediate favors using genre tropes can have, like emotional rappers who use "Lil" or in the 2000s when every "it band" had "the" before their name (which really makes me wonder—if they were "it bands," why didn't they just have "it" instead of "the" before?).

The downfall of using the tropes of the genre for your name is that you can be thought of as generic. But if you prove that you're a cut above the rest, it doesn't matter that your name is generic—you'll soon be seen as a calling card for that genre. You could find a lot of exceptions to this, but we're talking about rules instead of exceptions. A name that gives a cue to the music's emotion is helpful.

That's not to say you'll be boxed in by that name. You could argue Radiohead sounds quite different from their song "Creep" to "Idioteque" or "Burn the Witch," but all of them seem to fit well under that moniker.

Make It Easy to Find You

We want a name that people will be able to remember and then be able to find you when someone tells them about it. Let's think about music discovery. What do people do when they get home, and somebody's told them about an artist they want to listen to? They're typing into YouTube, Google, or Spotify.

But if your name is something like brakence, I list this dude's records all the time, but if one of my friends told me to check it out, I'd have no clue how to spell it with how they're saying it. This one's not even half as bad as many others. That goes for glaive too, who made my favorite EP of 2020. Never mind those days when all the emo bands named themselves after girls' names or towns' names like Madison or Hawthorne Heights. If you Googled them, the town would come up since they had no shot at having good SEO.

This is just one of those things that will make it easier if people can easily look up your name. If you're losing one out of every 10 or 20 people and they don't find you when they look you up, that adds up and makes things really hard when you're trying to build a fan base.

But if you're really good, this won't matter. Hawthorne Heights sold millions of records and brakence has

500,000 monthly listeners, so it's not the end of the world. But it does help to not to have these issues and make it easy to look up your name. If you are losing three to five percent of the people who discover you, that adds up, making things much more difficult to build a fan base.

You want a name that people have a fighting chance of finding easily if they go and type it in when they get home or when their friend tells them about it.

The Voice Search Problem

What's really taking over now is voice search. I guarantee you that in about five years, more than half the time someone goes to look up a new artist, they're going to be doing it by saying something like "Hey Alexa, play me the latest incel hypebeast joint."

If Alexa, Siri, or whoever can't recognize that because your name is something like "Kaffeine" with a K, and someone else has "Caffeine," you're gonna have a harder time getting a fan base. Never mind if you have one of those names that no one knows how to pronounce.

The Knockout Search: Make Sure No One Else Has Your Name

What is actually very important—unlike those last two, which are just nice to have—is that someone else isn't already using that name.

I know so many people fall in love with a name and see some total fuckboy using the name, and then it becomes some alpha thing of "they have a hundred monthly listeners, and when I drop my next single, I'll blow them out of the water and they will cry to their mom I made them look so stupid and then they'll tell their mother and she'll suggest they quit music and then I'll have that name."

There are actually laws around this, and so many huge groups have had to change their name because some stubborn person absolutely refuses to take a payout when the bigger artist offers them, because they just want to keep that name. They feel it's a part of their identity, and they don't want somebody to show them up. Even if only 90 people bought their CD seven years ago, if they're still playing live at the local bar, they may want to keep it, and you're fucked out of luck.

To keep it real, if you sign to a big label or management, their lawyers are often good at bullying the people who use that name to shut up. I mean, take it from a guy who managed groups named Man Overboard and In Transit—think of how many groups we needed to send cease and desist letters to when they blew up. But if you really want to spend the time building up a fan base and the potential loss of fans to do this, the answer is no. Trust me, it's no.

How to Do a Knockout Search

So what do you do to make sure you don't have to endure the torture of some dude who wears Supreme and raps about Hulu docs having the name you love? In the corporate world, they do what is called a knockout search. You may ask why corporations are talking about knockouts? That's because if you don't do this search, all of your hard work can get knocked out, and you will struggle to get back up and recover if you don't do it first.

If you didn't do this already, you can't blame yourself—no one told you you needed to do it. Even people who should know better, like Lady Antebellum, didn't do it. When they finally realized that their name was pretty damn problematic, like a bunch of fools, they changed their name to a person's name that was already established.

Then they did goofed even harder, and the consequences will never be the same. What is it they say about Top 40 country music rocks your brain? What were they thinking?

To do a knockout search, it's pretty simple, and you don't need to be a lawyer at a big company to do it:

Simply search your desired name on social media, then the streaming sites, including Spotify, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Apple, and then Google it and type "music" after your desired name. If all looks clear, we're almost there.

Now let me give you some advice every music manager will give you: after all is clear on that front, you want to check that you could have the same @ handle on every social media site. This makes it so much easier to promote if you have one @ handle and URL for everything. Whenever I start anything—whether it's a musical endeavor or a business—I make sure to use namechk.com, which can check virtually every screen name to see if it's free.

Anticipate Search Behavior

If you want to go even deeper on what's in a good name, you want to anticipate search behavior because it makes it harder for you to grow, and we might as well get this right if you're naming yourself.

Let's take the group joan. This is not an easy one to come up with on social media or Spotify. Look at what happens when you type in their name.

You want to make sure it's going to be easy to find you since you do yourself all the favors in the world and make it as easy as possible to grow your fan base if you come up high in search.

Yet again, I want to make it clear that this stuff simply helps, and it won't end your career. joan has nearly a million monthly listeners on Spotify, and they seem to be doing just fine to have people digging a little deeper to find them. But that said, that could be 1.1 million if this were a bit easier, so you do want to consider it.

Not to mention this problematic decision of a name we discussed in our recent dissection of Citizen…

The Checklist

Let's boil this down to what's in a good name. You want to make sure:

1. No one else is using that name (first and most importantly)

2. It should be easily searchable by voice or in search by typing

3. Emotionally complementary to what your music is trying to do

I know you have tons of questions if you're reading this—like what if someone is inactive and has the same name, or someone who hasn't used that name in 10 years is squatting it, or what if your name is Billy Joel? In that case, I have really bad news for you. But in a follow-up, I'm gonna get a lawyer to come on and answer some of these questions. While I do own a lot of cheap suits and know how to argue really well, I am not a lawyer, so I'm not going to answer questions like whether you need a copyright or trademark and what goes into all of that. I just need to know your questions, so please hit me with them in the comments on the YouTube video attached to this newsletter, or submit your questions to be answered on my members’ YouTube feed, where I answer all of the members’ questions at the end of each video.

Thanks for reading.