How many artists called Atma are there?
A while ago I discovered an excellent psy trance artist called Atma, and I got two albums by him, The Secrets of Meditation and Beyond Good and Evil. Napster lists a bunch of albums by "The Atma" including these two, and it appears none of the others are by this same artist, and the rest are not by one other artist. They are by several different artists. There is a hip-hop/rap group, a progressive rock and metal band from Ottawa, a psychedelic rock band from Los Angeles, a band from Arizona, and a French band. That's a total of six artists using the same name. Five have myspace pages I could find and link to. This is the worst case I've found of multiple artists using the same name. I had thought that with the Internet, it would be easier for artists to avoid duplicate names. Just enter the name you want into a search engine and see if someone else is using it.
Comments
Unless there is a major artist with the name, there's really no reason to limit yourself - most artists never make more than local impact, so why forgo a name you like because someone else 2000 miles away picked it too, especially since most of the people coming to your shows will probably never hear of the other artist, and there is a huge likelihood that the other artist will disappear over the next year or two . Granted, it makes it confusing for those of us who buy music online from a big aggregator lie eMu.
As someone who was in umpteen short-lived bands in the 80s, I can tell you that one of the hardest parts of being in a band is finding a decent name for it.