MOTUnation.com

Something's been gnawing at me. My girlfriend and I have been gigging around town for the last two years, under the name "Channelwood". But now that I'm wrapping up mixing our first album, I'd like to be able to market it. Unfortunately, it's not a completely unique name (being that it even stems from an area in an old video game). And quite a few bands nationally have the same name. They've come and gone over the last 20 years as well. Most of them are black metal bands, which is a far cry from our classically influenced piano/vocal duet material. Noone else in our area uses the same name, so my understanding is, we're cool on the local front. But I'd like to post our material to iTunes if possible, and that starts to become a bit different. From what I've seen, there are no hard-and-fast rules about multiple bands with the same name on iTunes or the internet. And I'm having trouble getting any concrete info. Anyone have anything that could help?

I ran into this myself with iTunes (going through TuneCore.com). There's another James Steele who is a saxophonist and he already had an album on iTunes, so when my own music was first posted, it erroneously was attributed to him. However, every artist has a unique artist ID, so the same name situation can be sorted out and it's possible.

The problem you may run into is that you're talking about a band name as opposed to a person's real, given proper name. In my case, my legal name is James Steele and the law stops short of suggesting that someone isn't allowed to use their own legal name. So after a couple of weeks TuneCore got it sorted out with iTunes and I was all set. You might find you have a more difficult time and I can't really be more helpful in that area. I'd try googling for more info. You might see if the pre-existing band had taken out any sort of trademark on the name.