MusicJet data

Band name availability study: 94% of the names we checked were already gone

Our band name availability study checked 416 names in the styles bands usually reach for, and only 6% were free on both Apple Music and as a .com. Every single common one-word name was already used by an artist. Check yours in seconds with the band name checker.

Key findings

  • One word is gone. All 150 common one-word names we tried (Ember, Copper, Haze, Flame…) already belong to at least one artist on Apple Music. Every .com was registered too.
  • “The” plus a plural is almost as bad. 114 of 116 names like The Angels or The Ravens were already used: 98%.
  • Two odd words still work, sometimes. 59% of adjective-plus-noun names (Velvet Static, Burning Rivers) were taken on Apple Music. 17% were free there and as a .com.
  • Across all 416 names, 85% were already used on Apple Music and 90% of the .com addresses were registered.

The results

Name styleNames checkedUsed by an artist on Apple Music.com registeredFree on both
One common word150100%100%0%
“The” + plural noun11698%100%0%
Adjective + noun15059%73%17%
All names41685%90%6%

A few that were still free on both when we checked: Scarlet Parade, Marble Horses, Cobalt Rivers, Violet Monkeys, Hollow Smoke. Don’t get attached, though. Someone may have grabbed them since, so check before you print anything.

What it means for your band

If your name is one everyday word, assume someone already has it. Two artists can share a name until one of them objects, and the bigger act usually wins. How to trademark a band name covers how the big clashes ended. Unexpected word pairs, made-up words and specific images give you much better odds.

We saw the same thing when we tuned our own band name generator. Once we told it to steer away from the obvious stuff, 85% of the names it suggested weren’t on Apple Music yet, against 60% before. The generator page also has eight ways to find a name if you’d rather write your own. All of this sits with our other band and artist name tools.

How we did it

  • The names: 150 common English words, 116 “The + plural” names and 150 adjective-plus-noun pairs, picked at random from fixed word lists (random seed 2026), so we weren’t choosing names we expected to be taken.
  • Apple Music: we searched Apple’s public iTunes Search API for artists and counted a name as used if an artist’s name matched exactly, ignoring capitals, punctuation and a leading “The”. That’s the same rule our checker uses.
  • .com: we asked Verisign’s official .com registry (RDAP) whether the domain was registered.
  • When: 29 October 2026. Names come and go, so treat these as a snapshot.
  • Limits: Apple Music is one big catalogue, not every artist on earth, and a free name there can still be someone’s trademark or Instagram handle. Spotify, social handles and trademark registers weren’t checked.

Use this data

You’re welcome to quote these figures or republish the table. Please credit and link to this page: “Source: MusicJet, Band name availability study, musicjet.com”. The full list of names and results is free to download: band name study data (CSV).

Where these figures come from

  • MusicJet’s own checks on 29 October 2026, using the iTunes Search API and Verisign’s .com registry, as described above.