Six Degrees of 33s

Names & Titles23 articles

What people, bands, records and songs are called.

• 249 Bands Called Indigo

  The most duplicated artist names in the database, ranked — a census of the words everyone reaches for, from Indigo and Legion to the 56 acts that are simply named Q.

• 3,011 Albums Called Demo

  The most common album titles in existence, ranked — Demo beats Greatest Hits, Roman numerals form a dynasty, and the moods cluster like a horoscope.

• A Field Guide to Band Names

  A word-census across 2.9 million artist names — black beats every other color, foxes beat wolves by four, dogs beat cats by eighteen, and forty-two acts are named Kraken.

• ALL CAPS

  Artists who spell their name entirely in capitals — KISS, ABBA, AC/DC, MF DOOM, and the rest of the shouty ones.

• Formerly Known As, Formerly Known As

  Bands molt. MusicBrainz records 1,937 official renames, and chaining them reveals five-name evolutions, a Swedish giant born as "Jones & the Poison," and metalcore's compulsive shedding.

• Greatest Number of Greatest Hits

  Which artists have amassed the most greatest-hits albums — Greatest Hits, Golden Greats, All the Best, Best Of, and the rest of the repackaging machine.

• How Do You Spell Tchaikovsky?

  Eighty-seven ways, according to the record sleeves of the world — the alias tables as a museum of transliteration, typography, and typos, starring Tchaikovsky, Lady Gaga, and DSCH.

• Intro, Outro, Untitled

  The most common song title across 39.6 million recordings is the announcement that a song is about to happen. The first title that's actually a song doesn't appear until eighth place.

• Musical Trifectas

  Full-length albums where the artist, the album, and one of its songs all share the same name — and how often that turns out to be metal.

• Named After

  MusicBrainz records 968 artists explicitly named after other artists — Pink Floyd's two bluesmen, the chain from Taylor Swift back to James Taylor, and the strange gravity of Macintosh Plus.

• New vs Not New

  Bands named "New X" (or "The New X") beside the plain "X" that came first — New Yardbirds and the Yardbirds, and the rest.

• Ninety-Eight Masks

  Vaporwave is the most anonymous genre in the database — 2.6% of its artists reach Wikidata — and simultaneously the most aliased. One artist wears 98 names, including a Florida shopping mall. Even Macintosh Plus has impostors.

• Parens

  Band names with parentheses — and how often the ( and the ) don't add up. Sunn O))) has three closers and no opener.

• Songs in the Key of Z, measured

  Irwin Chusid's outsider-music canon run through the collaboration graph — self-containment scores for Jandek, The Shaggs, Wesley Willis, and the family pod the Wiggin sisters lived in.

• That Name Is Taken

  132,336 band names are used by more than one act. The most contested — Indigo, Legion, Vortex, Merlin — read like a teenager's notebook, and 83 bands named Medusa produced zero famous ones.

• The 1,024-Character Song Title

  Twenty-four song titles in the database are exactly 1,024 characters long, because that's where the field ends — a natural history of titles that hit the wall mid-sentence.

• The A Bin

  The legend says bands name themselves to the front of the record bin, like AAA Taxi in the phone book. The bin is innocent — A-through-D held steady at a quarter of new bands for a century. The letter A alone is another matter; it nearly doubled, peaked in the exact decade your record collection became a sorted list, and has been falling ever since.

• The Alphabet Is Taken

  Every letter A–Z and every digit 0–9 is already an artist's name. A tour of the periodic table of one-character bands — X, M, Q, and the 56 people who all chose Q.

• The Business Card Album

  In the 1970s, one debut album in four was named after its maker. The self-titled debut — the business card of rock — has since lost two-thirds of its force: 26.5% of Seventies debuts, 11% by the 2000s, 8.6% now. The census of a convention.

• The Gratuitous Umlaut

  8,093 bands have umlauts in their names; nearly all of them are simply German or Finnish. This is about the other kind — Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, and the 561 anglophone acts wearing borrowed diacritics.

• The Rise and Fall of "The"

  In the 1950s, four out of ten new bands were The Somethings. Today it's one in twenty. Seventy years of the definite article, measured — with a detour through The The.

• Truth in Advertising

  73 working bands are named exactly after a genre. Two of them play it. The band Trance plays heavy metal; the band Samba plays rock; the band Power Metal plays heavy metal, missing its own name by one adjective; and the band named Heavy Metal declined to state.

• UK

  Bands with "UK" in their name — and whether they are actually from the UK.