All the Band Names Are Taken

No, seriously. That, according to the Wall Street Journal, is why Brooklyn is rife with unwieldy monikers. Although, considering the most common band names are lame as all hell, this is probably not a bad thing.

According to Rovi, the company that owns and licenses band name info to iTunes, the most common names for groups of human beings playing music together are Bliss, Mirage, One, Gemini, Legacy, Paradox and Rain. Which means there must have been a lot of bands formed in 1991 with the intention of doing Scorpions and Mr. Mister covers in front of billowing smoke machines. Rovi say they added 6521 new band names a month to their databases last year

Which may be why even the non-dreadful ones are taken. John Paul Jones, the bassist from Led Zeppelin, eventually decided on Them Crooked Vultures for his new band. But it took a while. "Think of a great band name," he told the Journal, "and Google it, and you'll find a French-Canadian jam band with a MySpace page."