With 14 million musical acts on MySpace, are there any great band names left?

Consider some of the acts on the Billboard rock chart: Cage the Elephant, Shinedown, Foster the People, Avenged Sevenfold, Young the Giant, Stone Sour and Alter Bridge.

Unfathomable band names are nothing new. (Procol Harum, anyone?) But in the old days, they felt more like a matter of choice than necessity. There were still plenty of things living (Animals, Beatles, Byrds, Crickets, Eagles, Monkees), nonliving (Doors, Kinks, Platters, Rolling Stones, Four Seasons, Four Tops) and in between (Zombies) from which to choose.

The world also used to be smaller. Way back when, you could have a Chicago band with a name such as the Catapults, never knowing that there might have been other Catapults playing in other cities here and abroad. (For what it's worth, MySpace features pages for Catapult, American Catapult, the Catapult Club, Catapult the Smoke and Elizabeth and the Catapult.) In the late '60s, separate bands called Kaleidoscope were based on the West Coast and in England with no Internet to bridge the distance and befuddle listeners.

But with millions of musical acts registered on MySpace, all it takes is a mouse click to learn that the idea you thought was original is just more recycling.

"Google is a dream-crusher," says Jim Powers, who runs the Chicago-based Minty Fresh label. He says one band on his label, the Blackouts from Champaign, Ill., wound up becoming the Living Blue "because there was already another Blackouts out there that had a record out."

Minty Fresh's roster also includes Ape on the Roof, Suburban Kids With Biblical Names and Sugarplastic.

"You almost need to get a random word generator, which you can do on the Internet, or get out a legal pad and start throwing out words and start coupling them together," Powers said. "That seems like the best way to roll now."