Many music apps including YouTube Music and Spotify have a have a hard time distinguishing between different bands with the same name. Sometimes this makes search results suck, other times you actually get music from multiple bands showing up in the same place. From a cursory look, Apple Music seems to do a better job with this (from checking the examples I had come across previously on other platforms). But it’s quite likely every platform is having to solve this problem separately, wasting effort and ending up with differing results as well.
So what if there was a central registry for band /artist names? It would not force them to be unique, but simply assign them a unique ID, and have an API that music services could connect to (for a fee?). Likewise you could charge a very small one-time fee for bands to register, perhaps. Like $1. Although making it an ongoing fee might be nice for stability of the registry long-term, but I suppose data access fees might cover that. It doesn’t need to be a profitable site, just provide a useful service.
There are probably numerous additional services one could provide to increase value, make some revenue, give incentive to bands to participate, etc. For example unique URLs based on artist UID which they can choose to redirect to any URL of their choice, like “Linktree”, etc. (maybe low-cost fee for this service too, like $1/mo).
Of course this idea is kind of an obvious one, and I know that it’s not for lack of the idea that this hasn’t happened. But I think perhaps the opportunity here, if there is one, is in figuring out how to make it a sustainable business while also incentivizing entrenched industry players to actually use this thing. Many of those problems remain unsolved, but are perhaps worth thinking about…
Also if there are existing efforts towards this, let me know! I’ve done very little research thus far. 