A Field Guide to Band Names

Walk the database like a naturalist: 2.9 million artist names, surveyed for every animal, color, food, body part, and weather system that lives in them. The kingdom's apex word is black — 6,619 artists carry it, from Black Sabbath down — nearly twice second-place brown (4,199, though brown is doing it the easy way: most of those are people named Brown, James foremost). The wild data is in the close races.

Hover any bubble for the census; click through to each word's flagship — the biggest catalog wearing the name. The races worth calling:

• Fox 1,384, wolf 1,380. Four artists decide the great predator election, and the foxes cheat: their count is padded by surnames, led by a videogame composer named Toby Fox.
• Dogs 1,182, cats 1,164. Eighteen apart out of 2.9 million. The database is a dog database by a rounding error.
• The pantry is ruled by jam (777, flagship Pearl Jam) — though 243 acts answer to cream, and every last one of them stands in the shadow of the one from 1966.
• Bees (572) outnumber lions (525), dragons number 372, unicorns 99, octopuses 109 — and exactly 42 acts are named Kraken.
• In the sky column, stars (2,174) narrowly beat moon (2,007) and sun (1,914) — but the sun holds the flagship, because the sun is Sun Ra's.

The mirror exhibit

One name-species defies taxonomy: the palindrome. The reigning monarch is, of course, ABBA — 1,466 recordings under a name built to survive its own logo being mirrored. Behind her: Irish choral institution ANÚNA (the accent survives reversal), Dutch proggers Kayak, Berlin's To Rococo Rot — a three-word palindrome — and Tacocat, who chose the name because it reverses. The exhibit's deep cuts: OOIOO; Dopapod, a jam band that reads the same coming and going, which given the genre's relationship to time feels structural; Diana Anaid, whose stage surname is her first name in the mirror; Milwaukee noise-rockers IfIHadAHiFi; Japan's RATS & STAR, mirrored around its ampersand; and 一十三十一 — a palindrome in kanji, reading Hitomitoi, so the mirror works in a second writing system entirely.

No moral here. Just the pleasure of a database that, asked a completely frivolous question, answers with forty-two Krakens.

Method: whole-word matches over folded artist names (ASCII word tokens; names with accented words are tokenized correctly so Antônio no longer counts as an ant, which cost the ants 358 sightings). Surnames count, and that's disclosed where it decides a race. Flagship = largest credited catalog among Wikidata-listed bearers. Palindromes: alphanumeric characters including accents and CJK, length ≥4, ≥10 recordings, Wikidata-gated. Computed August 2026 against the 2026-07-25 MusicBrainz build.