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Name Your Band Something Googlable

Last fall, I heard a song by the Canadian band Stars (craptastically unusable Flash site ahead…who are they kidding?) on the CBC. I liked their combo male/female vocalists and Meatloaf-esque pretensions. Recently Gill sent me a great song of theirs–“Your Ex-Lover is Dead” (if you figure their site out, you can hear the song).

On looking for their site, I immediately encountered a problem. You’ll see it too, if you visit Google knowing only the following facts:

  • There’s a band called ‘Stars’.
  • They’re Canadian.
  • You heard them on the CBC last fall.
  • They have a male and a female lead vocalist.

Assume for a moment that you don’t know the names of any of their songs, nor anything else about them. That’s a bit of a challenge for Google, eh? A free hug to the first person who can deliver a Google query that brings me within one link of http://www.arts-crafts.ca/stars/ using only the above information.

The clever Googler, I imagine, will reverse-engineer this problem by using a query like this and then generating a query to land me on one of those pages. That’s kind of an end-around. Try to stick with only the four data points above.

What’s the point? Nothing really, except that if you name your band after a common noun, you’ll make it harder for people to find you online. On the upside, it probably makes it harder to find your music on file-trading networks.

This entry was posted in:Music
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Published by dbarefoot

Darren Barefoot is an author, speaker and digital strategist. He’s the co-founder of Capulet Communications, and co-author of “Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook”.

25 comments

  1. Reminds me of when I was trying to search for the then-new Madonna song “Music”.

    Search: Madonna + Music = frustrating millions of hits (and including “new song” modifier = no help).

    I wonder if bands like The Vines or The Hives (or other one-word namers have received similar feedback.

  2. Fifth hit of a google search for ‘cbc “called stars” band’ got me a link to a Sloan message board. That got me the info that they were up for a Juno last year. From the Juno’s page I got their album title. Another google search for ‘stars band heart’ got me plenty of info about them but no links to their own site. Very obscure.

    Another side effect of having a general name for a site (ie. undefined) is that if you do get popular in the rankings then you get lots of traffic from people who don’t really care to check out your site.

  3. how I would do it

    If you give it a couple of days, Google probably links to this page et… voila! 🙂

  5. Adam: Good effort.

    Arthur: Good lateral thinking, actually. I’ve never actually monitored how soon a page from this site is indexed. Hmmm…

  6. Same messageboard (which is good enough IMHO since it has a link to ‘stars’ in the header) using this: “site:ca band stars”

  7. Ow. Is a different messageboard.
    ‘site:ca band stars music’ links to a usefull page which has a link to ‘paperbagrecords.com’ which looks like there label.
    Now, that wasn’t that hard, was it? 😉

  8. Harmen: Well done. I don’t think I would have thought of ‘site:ca’, as many Canadian acts use .com addresses. It may be your own experience with .nl (and the more common use of country-specific extensions throughout Europe) that pointed you that way.

  9. Funny: I ran into the exact same problem today.

    I saw online a rather nifty animated video by a a musician who goes by the name of “Never.”

    The song’s called “The Dream.” It features some cool robots, and was filmed in Vancouver. There are no lyrics in the song. Can you find this artist?

    It took me 20 minutes, and I’m usually a quick Googler.

  11. Proving to me once again, Darren, the brilliance of either “Hey That’s Not Your Goat,” or “T-Bones and Overflow.”

    Ahh, the memories.

  12. It takes a certain arrogance to complain about the non-googleability of a band’s name. Not everyone in life is after finding the best way to whore themselves out to be found quicker on google, you know — just the select few who burn the midnight oil counting page visits to their blogs.

    The stars make some fantastic music and if you can’t get passed the rudimentaries of how many search keywords it takes on google then I wish they were called ‘it’, or ‘and’ or even ‘of’. Just to make sure people like you would never stand a chance of finding them.

  13. Ali: I wonder how you’ve concluded that I’m ‘complaining’? If you re-read my post, you’ll note that I describe their song as ‘great’ and ‘liked their combo male/female vocalists and Meatloaf-esque pretensions’. I went on to display my ‘arrogance’ by dismissing my own point as ‘nothing, really’. It’s also odd that you would connect ‘burn[ing] the midnight oil counting page visits’ with arrogance. To me, it sounds like a desperate lack of confidence.

    As you may know, I’m in marketing, and have an arts background. So, I’m interested in how bands market themselves, particularly online. I’m not going to apologize for noting that a commonly-named band hoses itself in Google. Nor am I going to apologize for not discussing Stars in more depth or praiseful terms–I’ve only heard two songs.

    Speaking of arrogance, how would you characterize wanting to exclude others from sharing in ‘some fantastic music’? That sounds a lot like that first-cousin of arrogance, elitism.

  16. I’d never use Google to find out anything about a band. I’d look it up on Pitchfork, All Music, Metacritic, etc…I think people over rely on Google and it’s good to use other mediums as well (like say, even Amazon). It’s easy enough to add the search engines to Firefox up in the right corner too.

  20. Thought it was kind of funny, I was searching for ‘stars band’ and found this website almost at the top of the google list. your link provided me with direct access to the site.
    Also, I opened the wikipedia entry that was provided directly above it in a seperate window and that also provided me with a link to stars’ site.
    So I’ve got to say I didn’t have a lot of trouble with it.

  21. I recently discovered Stars and decided to look into them a bit more. Of course, I first came upon this blog, and thought, Oh, a challenge! Naturally, being the competitor I am, I gave it a shot.

    Given, this is over a year later and Stars may not be as obscure as they once were, but I searched for “stars band website”, and the site you mentioned was the first one to appear (I’m assuming it’s still their official website?). As an aside, your own website was found using the query “stars band”, in case you were curious. I thought it was somewhat humorous, hence the reason I’m commenting on a post that’s so long been published, also in case you were curious.

  24. BTW that band Stars is so over-rated. The Guy is a pompous a-hole. So don’t even bother googling them!

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