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”