What’s in a name?
When it comes to the music industry: everything. And thanks to a beautiful accident this week, we ended up unearthing some of the greatest band names of all time.
Right this second, there are precisely 806,457 artists listed on Songkick. That’s.. a lot. As any data warrior™ can attest to, maintaining that data is an infinite and perpetual clustercuss.
So, full disclosure: we cut corners where we can. And that’s how we ended up here.
Whilst hunting for duplicate artists to merge, developer extraordinaire Robin looked for short Levenshtein distances between every possible combination of our top 50,000 artists. You’re probably like, huh? But Robin’s all like:
The Levenshtein distance is a number equal to the additions, deletions and substitutions required to change one string of text to another.
Thanks Robin. In other words, we thought we’d find a bunch of typos that needed tidying up. Great idea, right?
In reality, what we ended up with was a veritable treasure trove of unbelievably good (and bad) pun band names. Yolo Ono, for instance. Scheisse Minnelli, par example. And Optimus Gryme, for that matter.
And it keeps going. Some acts are actually pretty well established; take Com Truise, Chet Faker, Mord Fustang, Joy Orbison, Joanna Gruesome — rocking that wordplay on the world stage.
But for most, it’s a pure (adulterated) lingual-homage to a cult icon: Shreddie Mercury, LOL Cool J, Sherlock Tones, Jackie Chain, Djämes Braun, Gnarlemagne, Steve N Seagulls, P.S. Eliot, Gringo Star, and where would we be without Fro-Yo Ma.
Then things get a little nuts. Enter Guantánamo Baywatch, Sly & The Family Drone, Haiku D’etat and friends.
If anyone wants to help book all of the above for a festival, we’re willing to stake our entire reputation on it.
