The band name thing, for instance.

From a perspective of word-association, you’re dead on – Tool wold have been a ridiculous choice for a band name had the group been focusing only on branding itself.

Fortunately they were focusing on making amazing music and the branding kind of took care of itself.

That’s one thing that needs to be addressed as well… it doesn’t matter what your name is if you’re trying to peddle crap. To focus entirely on branding, image and marketability is all important, but no where near as important as making sure you have a base for your representation. Greg, you and I both know that the vast majority of PR materials out there are BS… in a lot of cases its a matter of a company being paid to try to shine up a turd. That new Apple commercial comes to mind, where the “I’m a PC” guy is putting 9/10 money into “advertising how Vista is better” and 1/10 into making Vista better. Marketing is great when there’s some substance to it.

The other thing I wanted to note was the album title/url thing… I agree, the ease of this is remarkably simple and it’s amazingly effective.

http://www.modernguilt.com/

For bands this is a unique opportunity to stay ahead of the curve, so to speak. Everyone changes from day-to-day, but in the world of releasing an album, the album is viewed as the change – whether or not it took a day to write and record or five years. Branding yourself behind that tells the world “hey, I’m new – that was the old me on that other website, but this is me now” (which would probably forward to your new site anyways). And that’s what the internet is, this is me, right now – no matter if you’re a blogger or a band. That’s a pretty simplistic way of discussing it, leaving out the SEO effects and googleability of everything, but you get the idea.