The Beat Crave published recently published their list of the top 5 most overused animals names of indie rock. They list the bird, wolf, bear, horse and deer as the top – citing bands like deerhoof, band of horses, panda bear, wolf parade and birds of tokyo. This post got me thinking of these were the top animals in general – or is this just indie rock.  So I grabbed myself a copy of WordNet, along with JAWS (the Java API for Wordnet searching) and the 20K most popular artists names from Last.fm, and wrote a bit of code to find out.

Here are my results of the most popular animals of music:

1. The Dog –  with 14 bands including Temple of the Dog, Three Dog Night, Dog eat Dog, The Black Dog.
2. The Wolf – with 11 bands  such Wolf, Wolf Parade, and Sea Wolf .
3. The Tiger with 10 bands including  Tiger, Tiger Army  and Timid Tiger
4. The Bear with 10 bands like Minus the Bear, Grizzly Bear, and Panda Bear.
5. The Cat with 9 artists like The Cat Empire, Space Cat and Super Cat

So it looks like there’s some overlap between Beat Crave’s list of the top 5 most overused animal names of indie rock – we see ‘wolf’ and ‘bear’ on both our lists, but for our analysis, ‘dog’, ‘tiger’ and ‘cat’ are used quite a bit more often than ‘deer’, ‘bird’ and ‘horse’.

Using WordNet is fun (and the JAWS library makes it incredibly easy to use). Here are some more artist name facts:

Most popular colors:

1. Black (94)
2. Blue (52)
3. Brown (40) – but these are mostly names
4. Red (36)
5. White (36)

Most popular moods/feelings:

1. Love (44)
2. Joy (10)
3. Hate (9)
4. Terror ( 8 )
5. Fear ( 8 )

Most popular fruit:

1. Lemon (10)
2. Cherry (7)
3. Strawberry (4)
4. Banana (3)
5. Lime (3)

Perhaps one of my favorite band memes is to add a ‘head’ suffix to a word such as for bands like Radiohead, Buckethead, Zebrahead, The Lemonheads, Mushroomhead, etc.

One way to make sure that your band gets the most space on the marquee at SXSW is to have a really long band name. Some bands have done just that. Here’s a histogram of the name length of the 1200 or so artists that are appearing at SXSW:

This histogram shows that the most frequent band name length is 11 characters, (the average is 12.9 characters) with some as short as 3 characters, but there are quite a few with lengths of 30 characters or more, with one topping out at 43 characters.

Here are the bands that are getting the most space on the marquee:

• Jon Langford And The Pine Valley Cosmonauts
• Johnny Goudie and The Little Champions
• Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers
• Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
• Solange and the Hadley Street Dreams
• Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
• Hermano L backed by Ranking Soldiers
• Danny And The Champions Of The World
• I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness
• Bryan Scary and The Shredding Tears
• Steve Goldberg and the Arch Enemies

And here the bands that are getting the least space:

• WAZ
• XYX
• TAT
• Mom
• Fun
• fiN
• CLP
• Cla
• CKY
• Blu
• Aun

Note to bands – when you are picking the name for your band, try googling for it first – it is going to be a lot easier for people to find you with a name like “Jon Langford And The Pine Valley Cosmonauts” than for a band with the name “fun”