Artifact Title / Music

Creators

• Pretty much any band of youngsters identified as "boys", "girls" (maybe less so), or "kids" (i.e. Backstreet Boys, The Beach Boys, New Kids on the Block) where the members have grown up automatically becomes this. It happened to Sonic Youth long before their hiatus and will apply to Youth Group (whose biggest hit to date is a cover of Alphaville's "Forever Young") if they ever emerge from their own hiatus.
  • Sixty-something soft-rock duo George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam are still mostly known as Boy Meets Girl.
• Occasionally, a musician from a band that has broken up will join a new band, and that band will use the old band's name to take advantage of the name recognition and/or record contract. Happened notably with Scorpions in the early 1970s and Alice in Chains^note Lead singer Layne Staley was originally part of a Hair Metal band called "Alice N' Chains". When he later formed a new band, he adopted the former name with some minor changes in the late 1980s.
• Some Chilean bands had one more member than the title suggest because the last member joined shortly after the original inception and the rest weren't too keen to change it:
  • "Banana 5" are 6 members
  • "Los cuatro cuartos" (The four quarters) are 5 members.
  • "Los Tres" (The three) were 4 members.
• The Russian band 5sta Family (originally spelled 5ivesta Family) started out with five members: CoolB, V-kes, Tony, Loya, and Sandrik. Shortly before the band's rise to popularity, Tony and Sandrik left, and the band has been a trio ever since.
• The Allman Brothers Band, after the death of Duane Allman in a 1971 motorcycle accident, only had one Allman Brother. Since Gregg Allman died in 2017, any reunion under that name would be even more of an artifact—in fact, a reunion band of assorted surviving members have simply called themselves "The Brothers".
• The last time Average White Band (of "Pick Up the Pieces" fame) had an all-white line-up was in 1974, before their breakthrough album AWB.
• Country music duo Baillie & the Boys had only one "boy" in it after Alan LaBoeuf left in 1990, leaving just the husband-and-wife duo of Kathie Baillie and Michael Bonagura (as pictured on that year's The Lights of Home). This name remained until LaBoeuf rejoined in 1998 (although Lance Hoppen and Roger McVay substituted in concerts until then).
• Minor example/possible aversion: Blondie was so named because there were two other blonde singers present for their early rehearsals, both of whom left before they ever played live or recorded anything. This has resulted in a lot of I Am Not Shazam moments for the remaining blonde singer Debbie Harry.
• The Chemical Brothers were originally The Dust Brothers before the American production duo of that name (Beck, Hanson) threatened legal action. Their first album is called Exit Planet Dust in reference to this. The song "In Dust We Trust" retained its title even though it was no longer self-referential.
• Country Joe & The Fish, best known today for the protest song "I Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Rag", were originally a duo of Joe McDonald and Barry "The Fish" Melton. They kept the name even as they added others as full members.
• An interesting example comes in the form of punk band Dillinger Four. Their name was originally The Young Dillingers after a name they saw in a record sleeve under the Thank You list. When it turned out to be the name of a local gang they changed it Dillinger Four. At the time of naming, they only had three members so it was just a silly joke. Then they added a second guitarist and the joke just sort of became a normal name.
• Well-known New York rapper Fat Joe lived up to his name in his early days, but after the death of his close friend and frequent collaborator Big Pun in 2000 from complications stemming from obesity, Fat Joe began to take controlling his weight seriously and later took on an impressive weight loss journey. Though he is still larger than the average man, it would be a gigantic stretch to claim that he is still 'fat' as a point of notoriety.
• Five are a bizarre version. The two members that made the band famous (J and Abs) refused to take part in their reunion, thus rendering it a three-person band still named Five.
• GRIMMS were a pop/comedy band formed in 1971 by members of the Scaffold, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, and the Liverpool Scene; the band's name was formed from the initials of original core band members John Gorman, Andy Roberts, Neil Innes, Mike McGear (Paul McCartney's brother), Roger McGough, and Vivian Stanshall. However, Stanshall left the band in 1972 and McGear followed a year later so that only four of the members referred to in the band name were left in the band by their breakup in 1976; moreover, after their first two performances, the band expanded to include many additional members not referenced in their name.^note  Nine, to be exact, though not all at once. Adrian Henri, Brian Patten, Michael Giles, John Megginson, and George Money contributed to the first album, Grimms; Henri, Giles, and Money left in 1973 and were replaced by David Richards, Peter Halsall, and Gerry Conway for the second album, Rockin' Duck, while Patten left in 1974 and Halsall and Conway left in 1975 to be replaced by Timmy Donnell for the third album, Sleepers.
• Guns N' Roses is named after Tracii Guns and Axl Rose. The former was fired by the latter after missing rehearsals a mere two months into the band's existence, being replaced by Slash.
• Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds was a soft rock trio composed of Dan Hamilton, Joe Frank Carollo, and Tommy Reynolds. The group continued to use its original name even after Reynolds was replaced by Alan Dennison.
• Russian rave band Little Big started out as a quartet with included two little women (hence, the name reflected the contrast in size between the members of the band). As of 2018, both have left and no new little people joined the band, yet the name remains.
• The Mandarins were founded in 1963 as an all-Asian drum and bugle corps. Today, corps membership comes from all ethnic groups.
• When Maroon 5's keyboardist Jesse Carmichael took a leave of absence from the band in 2012, the band replaced him with P.J. Morton. Carmichael returned to the band after two years, but Morton remained, meaning that Maroon 5 became a six-piece, now a seven-piece following touring guitarist Sam Farrar promoted to being an official member.
• The Miami Boys Choir, an Orthodox Jewish pop group, moved to New York in its first few years, but never changed its name.
• Mojave 3 only remained a trio for a mere two years before they were joined by two other members.
• Goth Rock band Mono Inc. were named for their original lead singer, Miky Mono, who left the band in 2006 and died in a paragliding accident in 2010.
• Motown Records, named after Detroit's nickname "Motor City", hasn't been based in Detroit since 1972. It's now headquartered in Los Angeles.
• OMGG, a bluegrass band particularly notable for the fact that its bandmembers have all been playing since they were quite young - the name stands for "Obviously Minor Guys and a Girl". The oldest already isn't particularly "obviously" minor, and soon enough none of them will be.
• The R&B and disco duo Peaches & Herb, originally consisting of Francine "Peaches" Hurd Barker, who adopted her childhood nickname for her music career, and Herb Fame. When Francine retired from the band as a live performer in 1968 and altogether in 1970, Herb would continue the group with other female vocalists adopting the "Peaches" name despite their lack of a personal connection to it. "Shake Your Groove Thing", the duo's biggest hit, was recorded with Linda Greene as the band's third Peaches.
• The Piano Guys primarily do piano and cello duets, but they were named after a piano shop. A few songs have just the cello without any piano at all.
• This might be the best way to explain the stage name of singer P!nk. When she first started, she actually had pink hair◊. However, as time has gone by, she has changed it to blonde. Although, she says her stage name came from Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs, so it's possible that the hair was only dyed pink to explain the name, instead of the name coming from her hair.
• Pizzicato Five did start out as a band with five members, but that lineup didn't last long. They were a three-piece group when they got their Breakthrough Hit, and for most of the period of their greatest international success, they were a duo.
• The Pointer Sisters kept the name even though the two of the sisters have been replaced by the daughter and granddaughter of the remaining sister, none of whom legally have the surname "Pointer" but both perform with that surname.
• Secret Chiefs 3 started out as a trio but kept the "3" in the name once they became Trey Spruance and a usually much larger, revolving-door lineup.
• The "classic" Emo^note In its original definition, see the entry above band Sleepytime Trio started out as a trio, but added a fourth member not too long after formation, and were a four-piece for almost their entire existence, yet they kept the name anyway.
• Snoop Dogg's stage name derives from Snoopy, a cartoon dog. When he briefly changed his name to Snoop Lion, the "Snoop" part became an artifact.
• Space Twins were originally a duo consisting of Brian Bell and Susan Fox, who would dress up in Star Trek-inspired uniforms and pipe-cleaner antennae and perform for children's birthday parties. First they dropped the costumes and became a trio, then expanded further into a quartet. Though the "space" part of their name started making sense in a less literal way when they started incorporating more Psychedelic Rock influences.
• SSQ were named for their lead singer Stacey Swain, who went by the stage name Stacey Q. They continued using the SSQ name after she split with them, though she has recently rejoined the group.
• Subverted by the Thompson Twins. A trio at the height of their popularity (they had anywhere from four to six members in their early years), they became a duo after bassist Joe Leeway left.
• TLC's name became this following Left Eye's 2002 death.
• Japanese Power Metal band Versailles found out when they tried to perform in the US that there was already an American band named "Versailles" and changed their name to Versailles Philharmonic Quintet—a name which became awkwardly inappropriate after bassist Jasmine You's sudden death in 2009. While promoting their second album, they continued to use◊ the Versailles Philharmonic Quintet name despite only having four members. The name became accurate again when support bassist Masashi joined the band proper in late 2010.

Festivals

• When KROQ put on their second mid-December concert, it was turned into an acoustic event called "Acoustic Christmas" that fit well with the softer, sappier season and the alternative singer-songwriter fare that was popular in the early 1990s. When the concert series became yearly and increased in popularity, attracting attention from bigger and more rocking bands, the acoustic element was not made mandatory, so it was renamed "Almost Acoustic Christmas." In the decades that followed, the acoustic element is largely an afterthought, but the name remains.
• In 1992, the Big Valley Jamboree started off as a rock music festival in Big Valley, Alberta. The following year, it became an annual country music festival in Camrose, Alberta, which it has remained as ever since.
• Ottawa's Cisco Systems BluesFest (formerly the Ottawa Blues Festival) started out as a festival of Blues music (although the headliner of the first festival was Clarence Clemons; a fine musician, but not quite a Blues musician). For years now, as the festival has grown exponentially in size and profile, it has expanded its repertoire to include a wide variety of music styles, including Urban, Classic Rock and Heavy Metal, but thanks to the original branding, still has Blues in its name. Every year when the new lineup is announced, the same tired complaints about how "there's no Blues in the BluesFest" come up, even though there are always plenty of legit Blues musicians on the undercard and side stages. Bizarrely, one headliner in recent years that drew complaints from this faction were The White Stripes, who, although an Alternative Rock band, do actually have a lot of Blues influence in their music, and opened up their BluesFest set with covers of John Lee Hooker and Son House songs.
• The Rock in Rio music festival got its name due to the event taking place in Rio de Janeiro. The title became an artifact once the event branched into new locations^note Thus far: Lisbon, Madrid, and Las Vegas., and also for being less focused on rock and having other genres of music.
• None of the Woodstock festivals have ever actually been held in the town of Woodstock, NY. The name qualifies as an artifact since the original promoters, Woodstock Ventures, Inc., was indeed based in Woodstock (the idea was that the profits from the concert would be enough to fund the construction of a recording studio, the real project). The first one was held in Bethel, not even in the same county; the 10th anniversary show was at Madison Square Garden; the impromptu 20th anniversary was at the original site, the 1994 Woodstock was held in Saugerties, which at least borders on Woodstock, and the 1999 event was held at a former Air Force base in Rome, NY, almost a hundred miles away. The 40th anniversary was marked by a national tour. The 50th anniversary festival was originally planned for the Watkins Glen racetrack in New York's Finger Lakes, some 200 miles from Woodstock (and the site of a 1973 festival that outdrew the original Woodstock), but troubles with money and permits led the organizers to first try to move it to Vernon, NY (near Rome), then move it completely out of New York to a site in Maryland, before finally cancelling the whole thing after artists started withdrawing from the lineup en masse.

Genres

• Any genre named "New [something]":
  • Ars Nova, literally "New Art," is the name that was given to a style of music that was developed in the early 14th century, to distinguish it from the earlier Medieval Ars Antiqua. The "Ars Nova" label stuck among music scholars to the present day, despite not having been anything like "new" for about 700 years now.
  • Bossa Nova means "new beat" in Portuguese, but it hasn't been new since the 1960s.
  • New Age Music is more of a marketing term. Very few artists labelled as "New Age" actually have any connection to "New Age" religions. Some of them even reject the label and propose replacements like "Folk Ambient" or "Instrumental Chillout".
    • The name came from the attention given to some of its early stars—Andreas Vollenweider, Kitaro, and the Windham Hill artists—in the pages of New Age Journal.
  • New Wave peaked in the 1980s and certainly isn't new anymore. It is also worth noting that the term was used in the UK to refer to guitar-led pop music that wasn't punk, while in the US it was used to refer to groups that the UK would call synthpop.
• Alternative Rock used to be a less-known alternative for the more mainstream sounds at the time of their origin. Nowadays it's the dominant form of rock, and the name is pretty much synonymous with "modern rock." As with "indie" mentioned below, the term reflected these artists being released on independent record labels and played on College Radio, but with alternative's mainstream breakthrough in The '90s, "alternative" is more an aesthetic than anything else.
• Much mainstream "Country Music" is contemporary pop or rock with a steel guitar and a singer with a twang. There's still a few successful artists that adhere to a more traditional sound, though.
  • The very genre name "country music" has been a bit of a misnomer for a while now, since after World War II the big, sophisticated city of Nashville became the genre's permanent home base.
  • Very few these days refer to Country and Western music. Mostly those who would use the old saying, "I like both kinds of music, Country and Western."
• Dubstep got its name after "Dub", an offshoot of Reggae known for its emphasis on various studio effects (most notably reverb) as well as the bass, and "2-step", a subgenre of UK Garage that eschews the four-on-the-floor rhythm in favor of a more jittery, irregular beat. While early dubstep tracks fits this name well, the "-step" part gradually became obsolete as producers leaned towards half-time beats (half the tempo of regular 2-step) and put more emphasis on "dub-" (sparse, reverb- and bass-heavy sound) ^note listen to this example and compare to the previous one. Eventually, the "dub-" part also became obsolete, as the genre drew influence from Heavy Metal and Post-Hardcore and became much more aggressive and noisy (what many people today think of as "dubstep" was after this transition), to the point where many old fans would much rather call the new sound a completely different name (such as brostep or filthstep).
• Emo. Originally used to refer to a less violent and confrontational, more personal type of hardcore punk that was emerging in Washington, D.C. in the 80s, the term is derived from "emocore", which itself was short for "emotional hardcore". Today, "emo" is used to describe a type of music that is barely distinguishable from pop-punk, and the fashion style and the association with any mental state other than "constantly happy". It is notable that some modern-day fans who don't know the history of the genre mistakenly believe it's short for simply "emotional".
• Funk carioca sounds almost nothing like traditional funk. Thing is, back in the 1970s, funk and soul were hugely popular in Rio's favelas. But as a new music style^note derived from Miami bass, Latin freestyle, and gangsta rap grew popular and supplanted it, people kept calling the parties "funk balls".
• Heavy Metal changed drastically after Van Halen and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Early 70's bands such as Uriah Heep, Mountain, and Alice Cooper were considered to be Heavy Metal bands, but the term has changed to mean something different than what these bands sounded like. Today they're usually counted as Hard Rock.
  • The earliest metal bands like Black Sabbath used various tempos including slow tempos. Later they started down-tuning instruments to create music that often felt slow and heavy, so the name "heavy metal" fit. However, subsequent sub-genres would progressively ramp up the speed, and many did not down-tune, to the point where it wasn’t so slow and "heavy" anymore. Simply using "metal" as an umbrella term to refer to all sub-genres alleviates this somewhat, but even that word alone carries connotations of being slow and heavy that doesn’t necessarily apply to all metal genres.
  • For that matter, the same thing happened to Power Metal (the original name for speed metal, now the name for a style that tends to focus on dramatic instrumentation, fantasy themes, and symphonic elements) and Thrash Metal (which used to mean progressive speed metal with clean vocals, whereas the modern equivalent is often closer to '80s death metal).
  • From an instrumental standpoint, most Melodic Death Metal has more in common with Power Metal, Thrash Metal, and/or the New Wave of British Heavy Metal than Death Metal these days. The Harsh Vocals are usually closer to the high-pitched rasps and shrieks of Black Metal, too (although some bands still use death metal-style growls).
• Indie: Even when the band is on a major label, their genre is still short for 'independent'. (However, "indie rock" can also be used to denote a genre, specifically a lo-fi and mellow strain of alternative rock.)
• Pop: These days if a ballad is released without any rock overtones, country twang, or heavy soul influence, it's pop music, regardless of whether it is "popular" or not.
• Pop [insert-genre-here] ends up sounding more pop than that genre. Fast.
• Progressive Rock originally got its name from the "progressive" FM radio stations it was played on in the U.S. These were so-called because the DJs would, between playing the bands' latest magna opera, spend almost as much time as the songs themselves took to discuss politics from a progressive (i.e., very leftist) perspective. The name for the subgenre has remained even as the stations became increasingly all about the music, and even as FM radio of the early 1970s evolved into today's classic-rock format.
• In the '60s, R&B music stood for rhythm & blues music and was often applied to blues rock groups. Over the decades, it evolved into its present term: soul-influenced pop music. This has had the controversial side-effect of labeling (and pigeonholing) all black pop singers as R&B even if soul isn't their style.
• Rock-n-Roll initially referred to what we would call "pop music" today: music that's popular with young people. But over the years, rock became its own distinct genre. This has led to pedantic whining whenever discussions of rock-n-roll include pop, R&B, hip-hop, EDM, and so on, such as when artists from these genres are inducted into the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame. Their inclusion is true to the original definition of rock-n-roll rather than how rock is defined now.
• Trap Music got its name after "trap houses", which in Atlanta slang mean places where drugs are manufactured and/or sold. As the genre exploded in popularity worldwide in the 2010s, the drug connotation is gradually diluted.

Media

• The mid-20th century displacement of 78s by long-playing 33⅓ and 45 rpm records led to two terms becoming artifactual:
  • The terms single, EP, and LP were introduced with the format ... in fact, all the latter had a special logo on the cover that gave the format its name. They are still used today in describing the length of a recording despite most music coming out on the same format (usually CD or MP3 download) regardless of length.
    • In Germany, the term 'maxi CD' is often used to refer to a CD single. It was originally designed to refer to CD singles which had more than two tracks but came to refer to all of them.
  • The term "vinyl" was used at first for these new formats, to distinguish them from the older 78s, which were pressed on shellac (which was used to refer to them). Since vinyl more than made up for its greater propensity to break and warp with far less surface noise and longer running time on LPs, by the late 1950s in the U.S. at least it had completely taken over. "Vinyl" nonetheless continues to be used to refer to all phonographic records, and while it's accurate since that's what they're all made of, it references a distinction that stopped needing to be made a long time ago.
  • Similarly, we still refer to discrete selections from an album as "tracks" or "cuts", which makes the most sense on vinyl, even in the digital-download/subscription-streaming era.
  • The "long-playing" record, or LP, was so called because it had longer playing time than an 78 rpm or 45 rpm single, usually around 23 minutes per side, but that could be extended with careful disc cutting. Later formats would have even longer running times. Cassettes could contain up to 120 minutes, at the expense of thinner, fragile tape, so the usual maximum on commercially-produced cassettes was 90 minutes, with 45 minutes per side. The CD's running time was initially 74 minutes, but this was later extended to 80 minutes, all on one side. Digital distribution's only limit on running time is the listener's patience.
• Few music "albums" have actually been a book of discs in sleeves ever since the LP format made it convenient to put ~50 minutes of music on just one. And that was several decades ago.
  • Similarly, many box sets come in hardback book form with CD holders, rather than in a box.
  • "Albums" in the boxed sense were this trope when they were first introduced in the late 1930s. The first record "albums" were books with sleeves, holed in the middle, that records could be stored in and leafed through like photo albums (hence the name). They were introduced around 1909 or so; record companies didn't catch on that they would make multi-song collections a viable release at first.
• The talent scouts of the music industry are known as "A&R people" for their original job: "Artists and Repertoire". In the old days, when singers and songwriters were largely different groups of people, their job was to find the right singer for the right song. They still do that now more than people realize, but largely what they do is look for new talent.
• The idea of "B-side" songs originated in the era of 45 rpm records when the main song was on the "A-side" and another on the "B-side", but the concept has persisted even in one-sided cassettes, CDs and digital releases.
• The "flanging" sound effect, used on many songs, gets its name from being originally produced by pressing down on the flange of a tape reel. Since the late 1970s, it's been produced purely electronically.
• The companies that produce and distribute pre-recorded music, or the brand names they do it under, are still referred to as "record labels" from the identifying paper sticker on the center of a record. Likewise, In the 1980s, as vinyl gave way to cassettes and CDs, the companies who made them and retailers who sold them would still refer to themselves as "X Records," before the Vinyl Revival of the 21st Century made both the "record" and "label" parts accurate again. ^note Record as a noun (rek-erd ) and record as a verb (ri-kord or re-kord) are spelled the same but pronounced differently. Done as text they look the same, so it still makes an odd kind of sense.
• Top 40 lists of hit songs got to that number because it was the amount of 45 rpm singles a jukebox could hold. Jukeboxes are of negligible use today, and those there are use digital streams, but the name has stayed.

Works

• Walter Becker's 11 Tracks Of Whack album actually has 12 tracks. "Little Kawai" was added at the last minute after the title had been decided. In Japan, the album features an additional track "Medical Science", giving 13 tracks, yet keeps the original title.
• George Strait's 50 Number Ones contained all 50 of his #1 hits to date, plus the new song "I Hate Everything" as a 51st track. Said song was released as a single... and it went to #1 as well, thus invalidating the album's title in mere months!
• The Air from J.S. Bach's Orchestral Suite No.3 in D major is commonly known as "Air on the G-String" after a once-popular arrangement created by 19th-century violinist August Wilhelmj, even though it is now more usually played in its original arrangement.^note As the melody only covers a range of a minor tenth (A4-C6), it can be played quite easily on a single string; the original version can theoretically be performed entirely on the A string, but Wilhelmj transposed the piece down by a major ninth so that it could be played on the G string.
• Ayreon's title character dies at the end of the first album, and subsequent albums don't feature him at all or have anything to do with him, apart from one song on a later album. Now a completely new story has started, making the title even more of an artifact.
• The band Daniel Amos initially used their Bandcamp webpage exclusively to sell "official bootleg" live recordings, so the URL was "danielamosboots.bandcamp.com". Then they also started selling their studio albums, and even albums by frontman Terry Scott Taylor's various side projects, but the name "Daniel Amos Boots" stuck for years. In 2020 or so, they finally changed the URL to "terryscotttaylor.bandcamp.com" to more accurately reflect what they had there.
• Meat Puppets' Golden Lies is again named for a song that didn't make the album - their lead singer and guitarist Curt Kirkwood later reworked "Golden Lies" for his solo album Snow.
• Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy was named after a song that was ultimately shelved and later included in the followup album Physical Graffiti.
• Freddie Aguilar's song "Magdalena" refers to a Filipino term for a prostitute or sex worker, based on the erroneous belief about Saint Mary Magdalene being a reformed prostitute; this identification was made non-canonical by Pope Paul VI in 1969 but the belief persists.
• Penguin Cafe Orchestra's "Music For A Found Harmonium" is much-covered, particularly by Irish/Celtic folk groups. Very few cover versions actually feature a harmonium - most don't even try to represent the sound, and those that do, generally substitute an accordion.
• KISS's Music from "The Elder" was originally intended to be a movie soundtrack, but the film was never made.
• Radiohead's song "Nude" at different points in its development had more emphasis on sex in its lyrics and featured lines like "What do you look like when you're nude?" and "We look so funny when we're nude". The song was first released by the band on their album "In Rainbows", and this version doesn't explicitly mention sex or nudity, but the title "Nude" remained. Oddly enough, when the song did include lines about sex, its working title was "Big Ideas (Don't Get Any)", which would seem more appropriate for the officially released version.
• Christian Ska band Five Iron Frenzy's named their second album Our Newest Album Ever. And it technically was... until they released Quantity is Job #1 the following year. And more albums in the following years.
• The Silverchair B-Side "Punk Song #2". They originally used "Punk Song #1" and "Punk Song #3" as Working Titles for other songs written around the same time, but only "Punk Song #2" kept its title as a Permanent Placeholder: "Punk Song #1" became "Lie To Me" and "Punk Song #3" became "Satin Sheets".
• Duran Duran's 1983 followup to their breakthrough smash album Rio was called Seven and the Ragged Tiger, after a storyline that Simon LeBon had originally envisioned going through all the songs about a group of rebels challenging a repressive state. During the album's difficult production history, that idea was dropped in favor of just getting the record finished on time. Other than the title, it survives only in the concept for the "New Moon on Monday" video (more evident in the longer version).
• Queen's Sheer Heart Attack is named for a song that ended up not making it onto the album; it wouldn't be on an album until News of the World three years later.
• Anne Murray's album Something To Talk About was named after a song that the singer had wanted to record for the album but was ultimately rejected by her producers. "Something To Talk About" was first recorded by a different artist for a different album five years later, appearing on Bonnie Raitt's Luck Of The Draw.
• "Unchained Melody" was named after the movie it originally appeared in, Unchained. The movie is largely forgotten, but thanks to covers and use in other movies (most notably Ghost (1990)), the melody is still popular. It still works as a title because the lyrics are about a man wondering if his lover will still be there for him when he's released from prison, and therefore becomes "unchained".

Others

• Frank Zappa and Herb Cohen co-founded two companion record labels, Bizarre Records and Straight Records, with the intention to release avant-garde music on Bizarre and music with more commercial potential on Straight. Bizarre Records had some distribution and management issues, while Straight did not: As a result, Bizarre ended up mostly releasing Frank Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention albums, and Straight ended up releasing some music that was anything but "straight" (most notably Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and the first two psychedelic Alice Cooper albums).
• The name of CBGB's stood for "Country, Blue Grass and Blues," which the club featured before it became known as the birthplace of punk.
• The Chapman Ghost Fret guitar was already this by the time it began production. It was so named because the original design had the frets only go halfway down the neck's vertical axis; this proved too difficult to produce, but Rob Chapman kept the name because he liked it.
• In drum corps and marching band, the color guard started as the unit that held, or guarded, the flags (or colors, which always included the national flag, but usually included state flags or the flags of whatever organization was sponsoring the band/corps). Over the years, the color guard evolved into what is now essentially a choreography unit with flags, rifles, sabres, etc.
• The Mercury Prize, a British music award, is still named after its original sponsor Mercury Communications, which ceased to exist in 1997.
• The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has long expanded beyond what's traditionally considered rock music, with country, blues, R&B, pop, and rap artists having been inducted over the years. This has led to a Broken Base among fans and musicians, as many feel that only "pure" rock artists should be honored and chafe when someone like Madonna or Tupac Shakur is inducted over a rock band. Others argue there's now a distinction between the rock genre itself and "rock-n-roll" as a catch-all term for all popular music (albeit a dated one), and that honoring musicians who play "traditional rock" leaves out most modern artists, especially modern black artists. Even Dolly Parton expressed confusion at being nominated since rock isn't her genre, before learning that the organization's name had been a misnomer for a while.
• The "TVT" in now-defunct record label TVT Records technically stands for "TeeVee Toons" (i.e. "TV Tunes"): The label's first release was Television's Greatest Hits, a compilation of TV theme songs. Though TVT periodically released compilations of TV themes and commercial jingles (as well as soundtrack albums to TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer), it became better known for music well outside that niche, signing successful acts in varying styles such as Nine Inch Nails and Lil' Jon.
• The "Warner" in Warner Records is this from the label's days known as Warner (Bros.) Records, the music wing of the Warner Bros. conglomerate (or rather, sub-conglomerate, with an ever shifting list of co-owners including Time. Inc and now Discovery).

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