Among more than 1,900 acts expected in March at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, are bands with the names And So I Watch You From Afar, and Everybody Was In the French Resistance...Now! The f-word is part of 100 band names in a media database maintained by Gracenote, a unit of Sony Corp. that licenses digital entertainment technology.
For the generations of musicians who have taken up guitars and drumsticks, picking a band name has been as crucial as teasing out a distinctive style—and usually the name comes first. For a lucky few, a word or phrase can become iconic. The Beatles, before they were legends, were briefly the Silver Beetles, a nod to Buddy Holly's Crickets. Jerry Garcia discovered the name Grateful Dead in a dictionary.
The last decade's digital revolution not only transformed the way people listen to music, it changed the way bands establish identities. In the past, identically named acts often carved out livings in separate regions, oblivious or indifferent to one another. Now, it takes only moments for a musician to create an online profile and upload songs, which can potentially reach listeners around the world.
Lawyers say that has raised the stakes in trademark disputes, which almost always hinge on which band first used the name commercially, and where.
I appreciate the growing creativity in band names as it is easier to search for them in Google. I tried to listen to the Girls album that came out last year and gave up after finding it near impossible to locate at the time. Christ, it took me a minute just to locate Girls' wikipedia page.
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