MOTUnation.com

It's my own damned fault. I uploaded a song to iTunes via TuneCore (which I joined today) and it made it onto the iTunes store within hours! The downside is there is an artist with the same name as me already on iTunes who has an album from 2007 and TuneCore put my single up their assigned to HIS artist ID.

I've emailed TuneCore (they have no support phone) to ask if they can remove it and then upload again creating a artist account with a unique ID. Since I am using my own personal, LEGAL name it's my understanding I am not infringing. I will not change MY OWN NAME for iTunes. ARGHHH!

Hear, hear, Jimbo. You tell 'em, bud.

I won't change my name for iToons either; hopefully there aren't too many wannabe Monkey Men out there by the time I upload potential hittoons.

Well, one of my high school friends who is a Guitar God (and toured with John Hiatt for several years), switched to calling himself STEVEN vs. STEVE Perry, due to confusion with the former lead singer from Journey.

In fact, he inserted his middle name, just to be extra careful of no on-line screw-ups of artist assigment.

For the record, his pro career began before the more famous one, but that isn't what counts.

I'm curious about where this discussion heads, as it has come up several times recently for projects and/or people that I am either working with or part of myself.

As for my own name, there's little risk of collision, as I think I'm the only musician in the world with this name (there is unfortunately a pederast priest with my name in Oregon, who showed up in Google up until a couple of years ago so probably was reassigned as he no longer pre-empts my own showings and those of other respectable individuals with the same name -- including other priests who aren't tainted).

I sure wouldn't want to have to change or manipulate my name just because someone else came first, but it arguably helped David Bowie's career to have a unique stage name? Unlike Elvis Costello though, he assigns writer credit to his stage name vs. his real name (actually, I think he changed his legal name from Davey Jones altogether).

That's it then. I'm inserting a middle name just in case:

Monkey BeA Man.

There. That'll do it. Everyone wants to be the Monkey.

Turns out a unique artist ID is easily doable in the case of two persons with legal names. Someone pointed out to me on MOTU-MAC that there are two artists named Larry Wilcox on iTunes, yet they have different artist IDs. TuneCore got back to me and said that it will take TWO to THREE WEEKS to straighten this out however. Nice.