249 Bands Called Indigo

Somewhere right now, four people in a rehearsal room are deciding to call themselves Indigo, unaware — or worse, aware — that MusicBrainz already contains 249 artists with exactly that name. Not "Indigo Girls," not "Indigo Swing," not "The Indigos": Indigo, letter for letter, 249 separate acts.

Count every exact name collision across 2.9 million artists and you get a map of the words musicians cannot resist:

Click any bar to meet all of them at once.

The five tribes of the unoriginal name

The top fifty sort themselves into recognizable psychologies. There is the doom column — Legion, Inferno, Moloch, Demogorgon, Abaddon, Apocalypse — which is what happens when ten thousand metal bands shop in the same demonology aisle. There is myth and mysticism (Merlin, Medusa, Karma, Mantra, Trinity) and the sky department (Nova, Luna, Phoenix, Eclipse, Aurora). There are the artists who are just a name — 76 Alexes, 55 Davids, 55 Sams, and 56 acts called, in full, Q — and finally the moods: Silence, Bliss, Aura, Mirage, and the champion itself.

Why Indigo? It is the perfect storm of nameability: a pretty word, six letters, pronounceable in every major language, attached to no dominant famous act that would scare newcomers off, and vague enough to fit a jazz trio, a metalcore outfit, a K-pop singer, or a Bulgarian synth duo — all of which are in there. The name that belongs to everyone belongs to no one: of the 249, not a single one has managed to make the name mean them.

Two footnotes for the record. First, this census is exact: MERLIN, Merlin, and Mërlin count separately, so the true crowding is worse than shown. Second, the runner-up — 109 bands called Legion — is at least on-topic: "My name is Legion: for we are many." One hundred and nine bands chose the one name that is literally a confession of unoriginality, and every one of them meant it as a threat.

Method: exact byte-identical name collisions over all 2.9M artist names (bracketed database placeholders like [unknown] excluded), top 50 shown. Names are the artist's primary MusicBrainz name — aliases and disambiguated variants not merged. Computed August 2026 against the 2026-07-25 build.