The-Dream’s Search-Engine Optimization Is A 10

While music-business types were recovering from a week of drinking margaritas and arguing over how to better market themselves online at the South By Southwest festival, old-school Internet expert Anil Dash was discussing how The-Dream was using search-engine optimiation in order to make his name stick out among a host of search results for Susan Boyle:

The-Dream is one of the first successful pop acts in the world to have deliberately incorporated search engine optimization into his stage name. (If you’re fortunate enough to not be familiar with the practice, SEO is the effort that many people put in to making their content easier to discover on the web. It’s part necessary evil, part spam-inducing cargo cult.) You see, without the hyphen, “The Dream” would have been almost impossible to find on Google or iTunes or YouTube before he got famous. In fact, unless you have a fairly distinctive (at least in English-speaking parts of the world) name like I do, this can be a common challenge. But I posit that the hyphenation of his name made him unique enough to be easily discoverable even before he had hit songs. Simply showing up when people are searching for music or videos is a pretty important part of getting your name out there if you want to be a big star.

I’m starting to wonder if indie bands of recent vintage have taken the mantle of sticking out in search engines–sort of like in the old days, when you’d name your floral business “Aaaaaaah! Flowers” so it would show up near the beginning of the phone book. Wavves and UUVVWWZ (I swear I am not making that last one up) have to be easy to find online, right? Unlike, say, DD/MM/YYYY, which just seems like an invitation to get confused with a lot of liquor sites that need proof of age. The Dream Of Being Discoverable [Anil Dash via The Daily Swarm]