Googlability and the rise to fame in Germany
My friend Marc Hogan recently wrote a piece for Spin about up-and-comer (much to my dismay…) Lana Del Ray and the impact she’s had on a band sharing a similar name. Chicago band Del Ray is starting to show up on the German charts. The spike in sales is being attributed to Amazon searches for Lana Del Ray that probably lead to “Did you mean Del Ray?” Or as google translate tells me, “Meinten sie Del Ray?”
In scheming for band names or other things that need to be named (companies, albums etc.) I’ve always made googlability a top priority for myself. Googlability is the focus of results when you google something. It’s the reason why I didn’d name a band Tyra and the Banks. It’s why when I came up with the name Vague Babies for my band in high school I was elated to find out that searching for “Vague Babies” returned one result and that result was from some obscure book that no one cares about. As of right now, “Vague Babies” gives 4,360 results. And we haven’t even been a band since 2009.Bradford Cox of Deerhunter and Atlas sound fame once said in an interview that while they were getting big he imagined that people would come to their shows expecting to see the band Deerhoof. He imagined he’d walk on stage and they audience wondered “well there’s the skinny drummer, but where’s the japanese lady?”
I would argue that in most cases googlability is still a good thing to consider when naming anything you want to become notable, but I doubt Del Ray is complaining that they had to do a second pressing of their album.
Lana Del Rey Helped Make a Band Big in Germany
Lana Del Rey’s conversation-dominating rise has been a boon for at least one long-slogging band. As the Chicago Reader reports, Chicago instrumental rockers Del Rey are finally charting in Germany, and they owe it all — or surely some of it, anyway (we’re talking about the nation that gave us Falco here) — to the Born to Die singer.
The metal-leaning quintet’s most recent album, 2010’s Immemorial, has evidently popped up in Amazon Deutschland’s Top 20 more than once, with a high so far this winter of No. 7. Del Rey’s Jason Ward, who runs Chicago Mastering Studio with Bob Weston, tells the Reader the band’s German label, Golden Antenna, ordered another pressing of the CD after its sales spiked to 500 copies or so in November. Not coincidentally, that’s roughly when other Del Rey’s “Blue Jeans” entered the European charts.
Couldn’t the Chicago post-whatever band’s own daunting musical prowess account for the group’s sudden Teutonic renown? Ward doesn’t say it’s impossible. But he won’t deny credit to the singer, songwriter, and search-engine-optimization technique formerly known as Lizzy Grant, either. As he told the Reader: “It seems hard to think of another reason a criminally underappreciated band of oldsters such as ourselves would have a sales spike like that, though [Germans] do get all wet over both David Hasselhoff and Die Toten Hosen, so who knows?” You know what else Germans love? Beer!
