Picking A Band Name

Well you have a band together and have played a few songs, maybe even put together a few of your own original songs. Time to think about a band name. This can be a fun or a frustrating process and you never know what you will come up with.There are thousands of ways to come up with names. Some might come from the band, others from fans, other from dreams, but there is never an easy way to think up a name.
You can take names from things like;

• Books
• Movies / TV shows
• Places
• Peoples names
• Fictional names of people or places

Keep an open mind to ideas as you try and figure this out, you may be stuck with the name a long time.

Once you have a name in mind choose one or two more names as back ups just in case the name you really want is taken. A good place to start looking up names is http://www.bandname.com/ to see if your name is being used. Signing up is easy on this site and you can do a search very quickly and easily on any name you think of. You can also register that name through this site.

Also use other search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing to see if your band name is already in use. If your going to use a long name like say "Alligator Joe and the Swamp Rats", it might take you a while to sift through the net. But it is better to not have to rename your band after you have been playing gigs and handing out t shirts and Cd's.

Do some home work on names because you don't want to plaster it all over every thing only to find out your using a trademarked name. No use advertising someone else's music on you dollar.

Also a good place to look up names is through a registry office. You can find out if the name is in use and if it is not register it right on the spot. This will ensure that if some one else tries to use your name you can prove you had it first.

Rock and Roll and Have Fun!