TMCnet News
Modern Music, Band Names And Search EnginesEditorial Director, Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine
During my morning commute today, I listened to FM music radio, which I do sometimes instead of engaging in my standard National Public Radio-dominated drive, particularly when the news is all depressing. The station first played a Who song, then followed that up with an Aerosmith song. It got me thinking…in an era where a large chunk of the wired public gets its information from the Internet, which is of course primarily facilitated by search engines, Aerosmith has quite a (spandex-clad) leg up over The Who. Think about it. Type "The Who" into a major search engine, and you're just as likely to get information about the World Health Organization as you are about the band. You need to farm through pages and pages of results just to find the information you need (discography, song lyrics, interviews, etc.) Enter "Aerosmith," and you'll find any information you could want about the band on page one. Why? There are no other modern language definitions of the word "aerosmith" for the band to compete with.
Try looking for information about the band Yes among the 1.2 billion hits you get when you enter "Yes" into a search engine. Among the top results, you'll see a site or two about the band, plus information about "yes men," and Yes Magazine, a Canadian science magazine for children, and sites about the British television series "Yes, Prime Minister."
The "the" in front of the moniker of the band The Smiths makes for slightly more targeted search engine-based information, but type in "Smiths" and you'll find information about Smiths Aerospace and Smiths Medical, not to mention the Web sites of hordes of American families named the Smiths…if you're into looking at photos of strangers' aunts and uncles eating potato salad at backyard barbecues, these sites are right up your alley, though you may want to consider acquiring a healthier hobby.
There are exceptions, such as the results that emerge when you type in "Jethro Tull." The search results are almost exclusively dedicated to the band, and with one exception, completely eclipse any information about the seventeenth-to-eighteenth-century English gentleman inventor who revolutionized farming equipment and after whom the band was named. Poor Mr. Tull…lost to history in the face of Aqualung.
But these are "old" bands (pardon to anyone I'm insulting by identifying these bands as old, but know I'm lumping myself in there…The Smiths were at the height of their popularity in my high-school years, and I'm a big Jethro Tull fan). There's evidence that the bands of today are a little more savvy on the topic, though there are exceptions.
My 14-year old niece is currently enamored of a Finnish band called "HIM". While the band is fronted by the hard-to-misidentify lead singer named Ville Valo, try typing the word HIM into a search engine, and you'll find info about Hummelstein Iron and Metal, which owns the URL www.him.com, in addition to over 1.1 billion other pages, most of which have nothing to do with the "love metal" band (which should be pronounced "luuuuuuuuuv metal," if you're doing it right.)
On the flipside, try putting "Nickelback" into a search engine, and you'll find no references to anything other than the Canadian alt-rock band. On the first few pages of the search (and we all know that very few people go past the first three pages of results), you'll find links to buy and download the band's songs, plus sites with fan information, lyrics, concert tour dates, photos and discographies…a record producer's dream come true. Try putting "Buy Him" into a search engine…you'd probably give up before you found what you were looking for, unless you are my aforementioned 14-year-old niece, who is probably only a step away from asking her parents if she can tattoo the band's logo onto her forehead. (Teen girls enthralled with rock icons do tend to be a persistent group of individuals.)
It occurs to me that rap and hip-hop bands have it right. Whether by design or by chance, these individuals and bands generally have unusual and creative spellings, such as "Busta Rhymes" and "Dem Franchize Boyz," which will without fail bring people surfing for info about these acts to the proper pages. Many rock acts have followed the example, resulting in names like Linkin Park, Korn and Gorillaz, though there are exceptions: when Green Day formed, it was before the rule of the search engine reached its peak. Had they formed a few years later, perhaps a perceptive record company marketing department would have asked the band to run the two parts of its name together into GreenDay, which would have aggregated the search results in the band's favor.
An individual using three, rather than two, common words for the name of his act (i.e. Nine Inch Nails) has a better chance of showing up correctly to searchers. Typing in "Nine Inch Nails" into the basic (as opposed to enhanced) search line on Google (News - Alert) rewards me with a photo of Trent Reznor in all his delightfully angsty and leather-clad glory.
Of course, there are always search engine optimization tricks to be learned and wielded: a search for information about the band Disturbed leads to a first few pages almost entirely devoted to the band, despite the fact that its name is such a common word. I'm fairly certain I'm not the first person to think of the repercussions of band naming and search engines.
Just like I'm sure I'm not the first woman to be unopposed to finding photos of Trent Reznor in leather in her search engine results.
The author may be contacted at [email protected].
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