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Festivals
- When KROQ put on their second mid-December concert, it was turned into an acoustic event called "Acoustic Christmas" that fit well with the softer, sappier season and the alternative singer-songwriter fare that was popular in the early 1990s. When the concert series became yearly and increased in popularity, attracting attention from bigger and more rocking bands, the acoustic element was not made mandatory, so it was renamed "Almost Acoustic Christmas." In the decades that followed, the acoustic element is largely an afterthought, but the name remains.
- In 1992, the Big Valley Jamboree started off as a rock music festival in Big Valley, Alberta. The following year, it became an annual country music festival in Camrose, Alberta, which it has remained as ever since.
- Ottawa's Cisco Systems BluesFest (formerly the Ottawa Blues Festival) started out as a festival of Blues music (although the headliner of the first festival was Clarence Clemons; a fine musician, but not quite a Blues musician). For years now, as the festival has grown exponentially in size and profile, it has expanded its repertoire to include a wide variety of music styles, including Urban, Classic Rock and Heavy Metal, but thanks to the original branding, still has Blues in its name. Every year when the new lineup is announced, the same tired complaints about how "there's no Blues in the BluesFest" come up, even though there are always plenty of legit Blues musicians on the undercard and side stages. Bizarrely, one headliner in recent years that drew complaints from this faction were The White Stripes, who, although an Alternative Rock band, do actually have a lot of Blues influence in their music, and opened up their BluesFest set with covers of John Lee Hooker and Son House songs.
- The Rock in Rio music festival got its name due to the event taking place in Rio de Janeiro. The title became an artifact once the event branched into new locationsnote , and also for being less focused on rock and having other genres of music.
- None of the Woodstock festivals have ever actually been held in the town of Woodstock, NY. The name qualifies as an artifact since the original promoters, Woodstock Ventures, Inc., was indeed based in Woodstock (the idea was that the profits from the concert would be enough to fund the construction of a recording studio, the real project). The first one was held in Bethel, not even in the same county; the 10th anniversary show was at Madison Square Garden; the impromptu 20th anniversary was at the original site, the 1994 Woodstock was held in Saugerties, which at least borders on Woodstock, and the 1999 event was held at a former Air Force base in Rome, NY, almost a hundred miles away. The 40th anniversary was marked by a national tour. The 50th anniversary festival was originally planned for the Watkins Glen racetrack in New York's Finger Lakes, some 200 miles from Woodstock (and the site of a 1973 festival that outdrew the original Woodstock), but troubles with money and permits led the organizers to first try to move it to Vernon, NY (near Rome), then move it completely out of New York to a site in Maryland, before finally cancelling the whole thing after artists started withdrawing from the lineup en masse.
Works
- Walter Becker's 11 Tracks Of Whack album actually has 12 tracks. "Little Kawai" was added at the last minute after the title had been decided. In Japan, the album features an additional track "Medical Science", giving 13 tracks, yet keeps the original title.
- George Strait's 50 Number Ones contained all 50 of his #1 hits to date, plus the new song "I Hate Everything" as a 51st track. Said song was released as a single... and it went to #1 as well, thus invalidating the album's title in mere months!
- The Air from J.S. Bach's Orchestral Suite No.3 in D major is commonly known as "Air on the G-String" after a once-popular arrangement created by 19th-century violinist August Wilhelmj, even though it is now more usually played in its original arrangement.note
- Ayreon's title character dies at the end of the first album, and subsequent albums don't feature him at all or have anything to do with him, apart from one song on a later album. Now a completely new story has started, making the title even more of an artifact.
- The band Daniel Amos initially used their Bandcamp webpage exclusively to sell "official bootleg" live recordings, so the URL was "danielamosboots.bandcamp.com". Then they also started selling their studio albums, and even albums by frontman Terry Scott Taylor's various side projects, but the name "Daniel Amos Boots" stuck for years. In 2020 or so, they finally changed the URL to "terryscotttaylor.bandcamp.com" to more accurately reflect what they had there.
- Meat Puppets' Golden Lies is again named for a song that didn't make the album - their lead singer and guitarist Curt Kirkwood later reworked "Golden Lies" for his solo album Snow.
- Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy was named after a song that was ultimately shelved and later included in the followup album Physical Graffiti.
- Freddie Aguilar's song "Magdalena" refers to a Filipino term for a prostitute or sex worker, based on the erroneous belief about Saint Mary Magdalene being a reformed prostitute; this identification was made non-canonical by Pope Paul VI in 1969 but the belief persists.
- Penguin Cafe Orchestra's "Music For A Found Harmonium" is much-covered, particularly by Irish/Celtic folk groups. Very few cover versions actually feature a harmonium - most don't even try to represent the sound, and those that do, generally substitute an accordion.
- KISS's Music from "The Elder" was originally intended to be a movie soundtrack, but the film was never made.
- Radiohead's song "Nude" at different points in its development had more emphasis on sex in its lyrics and featured lines like "What do you look like when you're nude?" and "We look so funny when we're nude". The song was first released by the band on their album "In Rainbows", and this version doesn't explicitly mention sex or nudity, but the title "Nude" remained. Oddly enough, when the song did include lines about sex, its working title was "Big Ideas (Don't Get Any)", which would seem more appropriate for the officially released version.
- Christian Ska band Five Iron Frenzy's named their second album Our Newest Album Ever. And it technically was... until they released Quantity is Job #1 the following year. And more albums in the following years.
- The Silverchair B-Side "Punk Song #2". They originally used "Punk Song #1" and "Punk Song #3" as Working Titles for other songs written around the same time, but only "Punk Song #2" kept its title as a Permanent Placeholder: "Punk Song #1" became "Lie To Me" and "Punk Song #3" became "Satin Sheets".
- Duran Duran's 1983 followup to their breakthrough smash album Rio was called Seven and the Ragged Tiger, after a storyline that Simon LeBon had originally envisioned going through all the songs about a group of rebels challenging a repressive state. During the album's difficult production history, that idea was dropped in favor of just getting the record finished on time. Other than the title, it survives only in the concept for the "New Moon on Monday" video (more evident in the longer version).
- Queen's Sheer Heart Attack is named for a song that ended up not making it onto the album; it wouldn't be on an album until News of the World three years later.
- Anne Murray's album Something To Talk About was named after a song that the singer had wanted to record for the album but was ultimately rejected by her producers. "Something To Talk About" was first recorded by a different artist for a different album five years later, appearing on Bonnie Raitt's Luck Of The Draw.
- "Unchained Melody" was named after the movie it originally appeared in, Unchained. The movie is largely forgotten, but thanks to covers and use in other movies (most notably Ghost (1990)), the melody is still popular. It still works as a title because the lyrics are about a man wondering if his lover will still be there for him when he's released from prison, and therefore becomes "unchained".
Others
- Frank Zappa and Herb Cohen co-founded two companion record labels, Bizarre Records and Straight Records, with the intention to release avant-garde music on Bizarre and music with more commercial potential on Straight. Bizarre Records had some distribution and management issues, while Straight did not: As a result, Bizarre ended up mostly releasing Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention albums, and Straight ended up releasing some music that was anything but "straight" (most notably Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and the first two psychedelic Alice Cooper albums).
- The name of CBGB's stood for "Country, Blue Grass and Blues," which the club featured before it became known as the birthplace of punk.
- The Chapman Ghost Fret guitar was already this by the time it began production. It was so named because the original design had the frets only go halfway down the neck's vertical axis; this proved too difficult to produce, but Rob Chapman kept the name because he liked it.
- In drum corps and marching band, the color guard started as the unit that held, or guarded, the flags (or colors, which always included the national flag, but usually included state flags or the flags of whatever organization was sponsoring the band/corps). Over the years, the color guard evolved into what is now essentially a choreography unit with flags, rifles, sabres, etc.
- The Mercury Prize, a British music award, is still named after its original sponsor Mercury Communications, which ceased to exist in 1997.
- The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has long expanded beyond what's traditionally considered rock music, with country, blues, R&B, pop, and rap artists having been inducted over the years. This has led to a Broken Base among fans and musicians, as many feel that only "pure" rock artists should be honored and chafe when someone like Madonna or Tupac Shakur is inducted over a rock band. Others argue there's now a distinction between the rock genre itself and "rock-n-roll" as a catch-all term for all popular music (albeit a dated one), and that honoring musicians who play "traditional rock" leaves out most modern artists, especially modern black artists. Even Dolly Parton expressed confusion at being nominated since rock isn't her genre, before learning that the organization's name had been a misnomer for a while.
- The "TVT" in now-defunct record label TVT Records technically stands for "TeeVee Toons" (i.e. "TV Tunes"): The label's first release was Television's Greatest Hits, a compilation of TV theme songs. Though TVT periodically released compilations of TV themes and commercial jingles (as well as soundtrack albums to TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer), it became better known for music well outside that niche, signing successful acts in varying styles such as Nine Inch Nails and Lil' Jon.
- The "Warner" in Warner Records is this from the label's days known as Warner (Bros.) Records, the music wing of the Warner Bros. conglomerate (or rather, sub-conglomerate, with an ever shifting list of co-owners including Time. Inc and now Discovery).
