 Let's be honest, making a great song is obviously the greatest marketing tool, but one of the things that can help it spread, or even discourage it from spreading, is having a great name that you go by to promote your music. I mean, let's get real here. My favorite band is the 1975, and I did a full-body cringe over having to like a band who sounds more like the 1985, 95, or 2005 for that matter, and had to name this corny, but eventually I was won over and walk around town with their merch now on. But the inverse is also true, and that the right name can create curiosity. I mean, the first time I heard the name and you will know us by the trail of dead, I thought, I gotta hear what that sounds like. And they definitely got me as a fan for years, who bought a lot of stuff from them out of that initial curiosity. So in this video, we're going to discuss the dynamics of how to name yourself properly and make sure it does your music favors when you're promoting it. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to grow their fan base from zero to 10,000 fans, and this is Muse Formation. Sometimes you need to make a video that tons of people ask for, since this is the most requested topic I get now, but I know it's going to make my life a living fucking hell. I spent so much time over the last 20 years debating this subject with people, and I know it makes people so angry. Since if I make any point about the name that they use being flawed, they have so much hard work embedded in that name, and it seems to really anger them when they are confronted with the bad decision they've made and lash out at anyone who points it out. So if you've already named your music project and are worried it may be flawed, I urge you to please take three deep breaths before watching this, and 30 deep breaths before you flame me in the comments, since trust me chief. I've been roasting people in the chat since 1994, and you don't want to step to this internet tough guy's dunks. So why is a good name important? Well, let's first say this, it really could suck to change your name. Trying to spread the news your name changed is hell. Nevermind switching over Spotify profiles or social media could be a nightmare of the biggest proportions. So the key is we only want to do this one time and name yourself properly the first time. If you ask anyone who is in a popular band and then they have to go 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, so we want to take it seriously that you get this as right as soon 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. Okay, but so what's in a name? So I asked my friends in Facebook group, which you know there's a link to join below if you want to be a part of the best community on Facebook discussing music promotion, and it reaffirmed what I have been saying about this subject for as long as I can remember. What I think matters most in a name is that it emotionally matches your sound, meaning it could be really weird to name your Playboy Cardi type rapping self, the inquisitive one. When you're just going to spout a bunch of ridiculous ignorant stuff or like death metal. As well, we have to consider this. Every set of words or combination of them have some sort of emotional imagery that brings to mind something in most people's eyes, and it tends to help the lure of your music if they work in harmony with the emotion of the music that you make. I think there is ways to go outside this though. For example, I think no one had any idea what Blink-22 sounded 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, such as emotional rappers who use Lil or the 2000s whenever it banned had a the before their name, which really makes me wonder if they were it bands. Why didn't they just have a it instead of a the before? Yes, the doubtful of using the tropes of the genre for your name is you could 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. As you'll soon be seen as a calling card for that genre. Furthermore, I think you could find a lot of exceptions to this, but if we're talking about rules instead of exceptions, more than anything else, a name that gives a cue to the music's emotion is helpful, and 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 Idiotic or Burn the Witch, but all of them seem to fit well under that moniker. We want a name that people will be able to remember and then be able to find you when someone tells them about it. So let's then 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? Odds are, they type it into YouTube, Google, or Spotify, but if your name is something like Brackens? Brakins? Brackens? Shit, I listen to this dog's record all the time, but if one of my friends told me to check it out, I'd have no clue how to spell it out with how they are saying it. And this one's not even half as bad as many other people. 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, and then if you googled them, the town would come up since they had no shot at having good SEO. But let me say this. This is just one of those things that will make it easy, is if people can easily look up your name, but if you're losing one out of every 10 or 20 people and they don't find you when they look you up, that does add up and makes things really hard if you're trying to build a fanbase. But if you're really good, this won't matter. I mean, Hawthorne Heights sold millions of records and Braken's, Bracken's, or wherever the fuck his name is, has 700,000 monthly listeners. So it's not the end of the world. But it does help to not have these issues and make it easy to look up your name, since if you were losing 3-5% of the people who discover you, that adds up making things much more difficult for you to build a fanbase. Anyway, so 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. But now let's make it really annoying. In addition to it needing to be able to be typed into a search bubble, what's really taking over now is voice search. And I guarantee you in about five years, more than half the times, someone goes to look up a new artist, they're going to be doing it by saying something like, hey, Ananama Lisa, play me the latest incel hypebeast joint. And if Ananama Lisa, Alexa, Suri, or whoever can't recognize that, because your name is something like caffeine with a K and someone else has caffeine, well, you're going to have a harder time getting a fanbase. Never mind if you have one of those names that no one knows how to pronounce. Like God forbid Kabbala, Camila, Kamala, I got it. Kamala Harris drops the hottest jam of summer 2021. Since the amount of ways I see the second most powerful woman in the world's name pronounced wrong is equal to how many people I see who are wrong that teasers are the good way to promote their music. But ching. But what is actually very important unlike those last two or just nice to have is that someone else isn't already using that name. Like seriously, I know so many people fall in love with a name and see some total fuck boy using the name and then it becomes some alpha thing of they have a hundred monthly listeners and when I drop my next single drops, 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's actually laws around this and so many groups are huge have had to change their name because some stubborn person absolutely refuses to take a payout when the bigger artist offers them to because they just want to keep that name because they feel it's a part of their identity and they don't want somebody to show them up. And 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 in your shit out of luck. And yes, to keep it real, if you sign up a big label or measure it, their lawyers are often good at bullying the people. You use that name to shut up. I mean, take it from a guy who managed groups named Man Overboard and Transit and 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. 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? Well, in the corporate world, they do what is called the knockdown search and you may ask, why are corporations talking about knockouts? Well, dear viewer, 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. And if you didn't do this already, you can't blame yourself. No one told you you needed to do it and even people who should know better, like Lady Antebellum, did it when they finally realized that their name was pretty damn problematic and like a bunch of fools, they changed their name to a purse of colors that was already established and then they done goofed even harder and consequences will never be the same. What does it say about top 40 country music across your brain? Oh right, what were they thinking? So 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, all music, 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, now you want to check that you can have the same at handle on every social media site. This is because it makes it so much easier to promote if you have one at handle and URL for everything, which is why whenever I start anything, whether it's a musical endeavor or a business I use, I make sure to use name.chk, which can check virtually every screen name to see if it's free and that's linked below in the description FYI if you need a link. Then if we want to go even deeper on what's it a good name, you want to anticipate search behavior because like I said, 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 jump. This is not an easy one to come up on social media or Spotify. I mean, look at what happens when I 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 growing your fan base if you come up high in search. And yet again, I want to make it clear that this stuff simply helps and it won't end your career as 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 a million 100,000 if this was a bit easier. So you do want to consider it. So let's boil this down to what's in a good name since I think we should string all this together. You want to make sure no one else is using that name first and most importantly, it should be easily searchable on voice or in search by typing and most of all emotionally complementary to what your music is trying to do. Now, I know you have tons of questions if you're watching this video. Like what if someone is an active 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? Well, in that case dog, I have really bad news for you. But in the follow-up video of this, I'm going to get a lawyer to come on and answer some of these questions. And 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 the questions like whether you need a copyright or trademark and what goes into all of that. So I will get one to give you good advice. I just need to know your questions. So please hit me with them below in the comments. And if I already made that video, it should be up on the screen right now in the end screen. So click it. Otherwise, click on one of my many videos on how to grow your fan base from zero to 10,000 fans that's also linked right now. And be sure to like this video and subscribe. Thanks for watching.