I'm just curious as to what the industry standard is, and if anyone is a bit more creative than that. I figure it warrants a bit of thought, since once you pick a name/brand, it lasts forever.
Also, there is this:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/who-wins-in-the-name-game/374912/
And I think I read on here that for composers, artist names are frowned upon, or considered juvenile.
Haha that was a great article. I'd heard about this before and it's why I've always thought if I have a daughter, I'm definitely gonna name her "Bill."
Was listening to another tech startup podcast and one of them mentioned how a serial entrepreneur always looks towards "four letter words" for their company names/domains. I thought that was interesting. The shorter the better.
I bought the domain name outlierstudios.co, so imagine how long my email address is when you combine that domain name with my name.
Not only that, but people tend to ask, ".co or .com?" Or even worse, they don't ask at all.
My next company's gonna be a 4 letter word.
As for artist names, my friends (2 people) "The Young Ebenezers" have had no problems finding work and being taken seriously in our industry.
I have another friend whose name is Rich Vreeland. He writes music for a ton of games, and a few movies/shows like
It Follows, Under the Silver Lake, and
Adventure Time. He goes by "Disasterpeace."
S U R V I V E was a standalone band before they jumped into
Stranger Things.
JunkieXL is one of the busiest composers there is.
And even if some of these folks go by their real names on movie credits, there's no don't they were taken seriously with artist names.
A brand is ultimately what we make it to be, despite preconceived ideas about the words used, I think.