The importance of using a unique name as an artist or band

Written by Kyle Kraft of Krafty Entertainment

Krafty Entertainment is a music business development coaching company dedicated to providing guidance to musicians (and their teams) on how best to nurture supporters and profit from doing so. Krafty Entertainment’s founder Kyle Kraft has over 20 years experience in assisting both developing and established artists in substantially growing their net income from their music. Interested in working with us? Let’s talk!

If you are a musician who is looking to build a fan base, the Internet is most likely going to be the primary means of potential fans finding your music. Therefore it is imperative that the name you are going by as a band or artist allows for as many people as possible to find your music when they type it in somewhere to search for it without getting sidetracked by unrelated content. This is referred to as having a name with good SEO, or search engine optimization. 

It is important to insure that the name you are going by allows for people to find your music easily when they search for it using your name. This means using a name that no other musician (even one in a different genre) with any kind of following is using, and also something that isn't a common word or expression that would result in a lot of unrelated results if someone searched for it. 

Of course there are plenty of very successful and established artists out there using common single words or groups of words as their name, but chances are if you're reading this you are not already very established. It's easy to look at the people that are already successful and say "it's working for them, so it can work for me" but the reality is if you're in the process of building a career you have a large (and likely long) uphill climb ahead of you and would be wise to make that climb as easy as possible on yourself. 

At present the most popular place people go to listen to music online is YouTube, with Spotify and other audio-only music streaming services hot on its heels. iTunes accounts for the majority of paid downloads, but paid downloads are decreasing as streaming continues to become more and more popular. Google (which owns YouTube, and which YouTube's search algorithms are based upon) is the most popular search engine. 

If you’re already actively releasing music and your name is not already going to appear near or at the top of the first page of the search results when it typed into all of those outlets, you would be wise to change the name you are going by as an artist or band to make building a fan base easier. If your YouTube search returns a page full of videos with hundreds of thousands of views with videos that have nothing to do with you, you should probably consider finding another name to use.

If you don't already have tens of thousands of real supporters who have contributed financially to your career by buying your music, Merch, or tickets to shows where you were the headlining act, it is definitely not too late to change the name you're using. Even if you already have a strong fan base you can still bring most of your supporters along by using both names with an "aka" between them for a release or two before making the transition to your more search engine-optimized name. You can also make your new name contain the old name by adding additional words, letters, or numbers to the original name BUT be cautious in using regional or country-specific additions like names of cities, area codes, etc as that may result in less support from people based elsewhere in the world. 

Even established artists change the name they go by as a result of new collaborators in groups, marriage, their religions, lawsuits from someone else using the same name, and so on. While established artists who are changing their names have to do some work in the short term to educate their supporters on their new branding, they usually are able to keep most of their supporters especially in this age of artists having direct contact with their supporters via the Internet.

It is already a difficult task to build a business as musician. You’d be smart to ensure you aren’t making it harder, more expensive, and time consuming than it needs to be by using a name that is as unique as possible so that people who are interested in you can easily find you online.

This information was compiled by Kyle Kraft of Krafty Entertainment. Whether you are an artist who is in the early stages of building your career and have next to no money to invest into it looking for the best paths to generating income, are an artist that has established a following and are interested in getting assistance with securing tens of thousands of dollars in funding to further your career, or are an artist or collective with an extensive fan base that would like assistance with increasing the efficiency of your business development, we can help you.

 Want to read more articles written by Kyle? You can do so here.