Who else hates when someone beats you to a name?

[factory presets]

Nowadays it's hard to find one or two word band names that have a ring and are not taken.
But on the other hand, there are more possibilities as well.

Just assume anything short and snappy is already taken. Time to start on the anagrams and such. For instance, Subfocus is a great name. And sure enough it is in use in dnb. But if you say it backwards...

I'm confident no one is using that.

 

[Spectrum]

I think Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers is a good name, but it would have been a GREAT name if no one in the band was named Tom Petty.

My band has a bunch of alternate names. One of them is "Big Jake and the Goddammits".

Of course, there is no Jake in the band.

Pretty sure if I saw the local pub advertising Picasso on Friday night, I'd assume it was the name of a band.

Similarly, the band Bauhaus was named after a German art movement from the 1920s.

 

[Bard2dbone]

Jethro Tull was a farm equipment inventor a couple hundred years ago. I think he invented the combine and made improvements on what then passed for the cotton gin. He is NOT, in fact, a bearded British flautist.

 

[Bard2dbone]

I'm just gonna go with it.

This project will be Meanwhile, Elsewhere by Roy G Biv.

After I decided this, Professor Stupendous is sounding better and better. The project will still be called Meanwhile, Elsewhere.

 

[tpaul]

There used to be a band in the Woodstock NY area called Enormous Johnson.

 

[Bard2dbone]

I knew some guys in the 80s who called their band Dixie Normous. I'm 391% positive they weren't the only ones to have used that name.

 

[biguglyman]

I was in a punk band years ago called The H. Roids.

 

[Michedelic]

What about bands where the "person's name" before the plural word is a fake or joke name?

My old punk band's stupid placeholder name (until we decided on our one-word official name) was "Billy Rubin and the Specula." Billy Rubin being a play on the word bilirubin, which is the chemical compound in our bodies that makes our piss yellow and our poop brown.

That’s a little too inside.

 

[Bard2dbone]

I was in a punk band years ago called The H. Roids.

A friend back in the day was in a punk band called Wrecktal Itch. Yes. They spelled it that . No, seriously. They thought they were clever.

 

[biguglyman]

Rock-n-Roid!

 

[Bard2dbone]

That’s a little too inside.

It's only inside while the specula are being used.

I've considered or suggested a BUNCH of medical terms as band names over the years.

 

[el murdoque]

Just assume anything short and snappy is already taken. Time to start on the anagrams and such. For instance, Subfocus is a great name. And sure enough it is in use in dnb. But if you say it backwards...

I'm confident no one is using that.

Apart from that, you have the ability to change the meaning of something by adding numbers.
Like, 'Capitalism' vs. 'Capitalism 4.1'.