Don’t name your band Atlas if you’re looking to stand out.
In high school, I was in a shitty emo band called My Apollo (which, in retrospect, is a pretty textbook name for a shitty high school emo band). It doesn’t land us on the list of unoriginal hacks below — but it gets us pretty close.
On Tuesday, @bandcamp tweeted a list of the 10 most used band names according to the site’s registrants. Bloom and Apollo top the list, bested by a whopping 59 bands named Atlas, which claims the title The Most Used Band Name on Bandcamp.
There are some trends at work here: all of the names are one word, all are nouns (though those Bloom bands might imagine themselves differently), and they all fall in the apparent sweet spot between 4 and 7 letters. They’re all real ethereal sounding, too: Ghost and Haze and Paradox. Like they’re complex, mysterious, tricky to grasp. Real heady stuff, man.
And they’d all fit in nicely at your average pay-to-play battle of the bands. The paradox with Zero and Indigo — I can see it now.
Most used band names on Bandcamp: 1. Atlas (59 bands!) 2. Apollo 3. Bloom 4. Nomad 5. Paradox 6. Moon 7. Haze 8. Zero 9. Ghost 10. Indigo
— bandcamp (@Bandcamp) June 9, 2015
