The A Bin

Every business district in the old world had its AAA Taxi, its Aabco Plumbing, its A-1 Locksmith — names chosen by men who understood that the phone book was read from the front, and that the alphabet was the one advertising surface nobody billed you for. The legend says musicians learned the same trick: name the band toward the front and the record bin does your promotion. It is a tidy theory, and the database holds 240,401 band founding dates against which to try it. So let us try it.

The record bin is innocent. If bands were gaming the front of the bin — the flip through A, B, C, D before the fingers tire — the front of the bin should swell over time. It does not. Bands beginning with A through D were 25.9 percent of new bands in the 1950s, 26.0 in the '60s, 27.5 in the '80s, 27.4 in the 2000s, 24.3 in the 2020s. A quarter of the alphabet took a quarter of the bands, decade in, decade out, for a hundred years. Whoever was supposed to be rigging the bin never showed up for work.

Then you look at the letter A by itself, and the case reopens:

Follow the red line. In the 1950s — the golden age of the record bin, when flipping cardboard was the only search engine there was — the letter A took 3.9 percent of new band names, almost exactly the 3.85 an honest alphabet would deal it. Then it climbs. Through the '70s and '80s, past six percent. Through the '90s, past seven. It peaks at 7.6 percent in the 2000s — double its bin-era share, one new band in thirteen — in precisely the decade the record collection stopped being a bin and became a list: the iPod library, the file manager, the burned-CD folder, every one of them sorted A-first by a machine that put the top of the alphabet on screen and everything else below the scroll. And then the letter falls — 6.7, 6.3 — exactly as recommendation engines and search boxes replaced scrolling, and being first in the alphabet stopped being a place anyone could see.

The green line is the control. B was the biggest letter of the early century and has no modern reason to be gamed — no scroll rewards second place — and B drifts gently down the whole way. The two lines cross in the 1990s and part forever.

A word for the defense, before the verdict. The graph records outcomes, not motives. Nobody filed paperwork saying we are called Abacus to beat Zebra to the eyeball, and some of A's rise may be plain fashion, or the globe's naming habits shifting under the Latin alphabet. The evidence is circumstantial. But Doyle's rule holds — theorize after the data — and the data says: the effect is real, it is specific to the first letter, it arrives with the sorted screen and retreats with it. The bin never mattered. The top of the list mattered for about thirty years.

So we dusted for fingerprints. If bands gamed the alphabet the way locksmiths did, the tells would be stunt spellings — the AA- prefix, the A-then-a-digit. They are not there. Among A-named bands, AA-spellings hold flat near 0.6 percent in every decade since the 1960s; digit-second-characters never clear a third of a percent; and the second letter of A-names keeps the same shape throughout — An-, Al-, Ar-, the ordinary furniture of English, leading in every decade (the single-letter names are a different census entirely). Nobody named a band AAAA Sound Solutions. Whatever bent the curve wore gloves: real words, respectably spelled, simply chosen — if chosen is the word — from the A shelf of the dictionary a little more often each year the screens sorted harder.

And S — S has been king in every decade since the 1920s, hovering around eleven percent, unbothered, unbribed. Nobody games S. The S bands were going to be The Something regardless, and the sort name just files off the The (the definite article, whose own collapse is a separate case). Some letters are simply where the language keeps its nouns. The alphabet was gamed, briefly and politely — no stunts, no double-A vulgarity, just a quiet thumb on the scale among honest words — by about one band in thirty, aiming at a machine that has already stopped existing. The bands they named are still out there, at the top of lists nobody scrolls anymore — monuments, like all names, to how the world was sorted the year they were born.

Method: groups only (MB artist type ≠ person) with a founding year 1900–2026: 240,401 bands after filtering. First letter of the MusicBrainz sort name (leading articles already moved to the end by MB convention), uppercased; only initials A–Z are counted, so names beginning with digits, punctuation, or non-Latin scripts sit outside the denominators — shares are within Latin-initial names per decade. Decade totals range from 203 (1900s) to 70,291 (2010s); the 2020s are a partial decade. Computed August 2026 against the 2026-07-25 MusicBrainz build.