By Any Other Name — The Data Behind Pseudonyms in Music

Becoming a pop star is all about making your name unforgettable. But sometimes the weight of a single identity becomes suffocating. Musicians have long released music under pseudonyms or alternative artist names to break out from the persona that made them celebrities, but sometimes adopting a new identity can result in a surprise hit.

The Pre-Internet Era

Some of the most recognizable examples of this trend come from before social media dominance. David Johansen, the frontman for the cross-dressing proto-punk band New York Dolls, had his biggest hit with 1987’s “Hot Hot Hot,” a campy calypso cover performed under the name “Buster Poindexter.” A similar case happened with the perpetually-underrated English band XTC, who released two records of psychedelic, experimental tracks under the name “The Dukes of Stratosphear.” Initially promoted by Virgin Records as a new band of their own, the Dukes’ albums 25 O’Clock and Psyonic Psunspot outsold their XTC counterparts on release. Famously, country star Garth Brooks developed the faux-rocker persona Chris Gaines for an ill-advised mockumentary project in 1999. Unlike the others, nobody bought into this alternative identity (including Brooks), but he did achieve his first Billboard top-five hit, “Lost in You,” under the Chris Gaines guise.

Upon release, David Johansen, XTC, and Garth Brooks all had hits under alternative names that outshined their main music. On streaming services, however, the numbers have shifted — The New York Dolls’ “Personality Crisis” edges out “Hot Hot Hot” for Johansen’s most-streamed song with more than 23 million plays. The biggest XTC songs — “Dear God” with 33 million streams and “Making Plans for Nigel” with nearly 60 million — dwarf the total streams for The Dukes of Stratosphear. Garth Brooks’ music is available only on Amazon Music, where he has racked up more than a million followers, but his discography doesn’t feature Chris Gaines.

Multiple artists have had hits under alternate names, but it sometimes takes a while for audiences to discover the connection. Now that music discovery largely takes place online, a viral moment can help bring attention to an artist and their alter egos. 

Imogen Heap — Frou Frou and Features

Imogen Heap has been an unsung hero of pop music’s sound for the better part of three decades. A recent clip of her singing “Headlock” acapella in a forest went viral on TikTok with over 1.7 million likes, bringing a new round of attention to one of the internet’s most iconic voices. 

While Heap was an early electropop pioneer in the 2000s, audiences don’t always associate her biggest songs with her because her vocals are sampled or credited under different artist names. Following her recent viral moment, creators on TikTok have made helpful guides to her music. “You haven’t heard of Imogen Heap? —” one states, “Yes, you have.”

One of her online hits, “A New Kind of Love,” was released as a demo single under the name “Frou Frou,”  her duo project with producer Guy Sigisworth. The track has a multi-layered lead vocal that became a staple of remixes in different styles from trance to breakcore, but unless you recognize her voice, it’s hard for some to make the immediate connection back to Heap. 

Most of Heap’s biggest cultural associations come from samples — her voice is featured in songs by Jason Derulo, A$AP Rocky, Ariana Grande, and more. While she is linked as a featured artist on songs like Rocky’s “I Smoked My Brain Away (I'm God X Demons Mashup),” sometimes, despite being a standout part of a song, she’s not directly credited on streaming services. Although, since the release of this track with Rocky on August 18, 2023, her streaming numbers have skyrocketed, rising from 2.7 million to 15.3 million by December 9, 2024. No doubt fueled by the song's 376.3 million streams (the highest on Heap's Spotify).

In spite of this, her recent social media momentum shows a growing recognition from online audience who may have missed her initial brush with stardom. Most major internet metrics related to Imogen Heap, from Spotify listeners to YouTube channel views to Wikipedia page visits and more, have seen a consistent rise over the past two months, showing that even with her misunderstood credits, her music still connects with listeners across multiple generations.

Four Tet and a Few More

While alter egos can be uncommon in pop music, they’re more standard in dance music. Electronic artists often use different names for different genres. When Eric Prydz makes slamming techno instead of his glittery progressive house, he uses the moniker Cirez D. Claude VonStroke built a global community around his signature quirky house beats, but when he produces under his real name, Barclay Crenshaw, he makes alternative hip-hop.

However, some electronic artists, like Four Tet—one of the genre's biggest stars—use highly obscure pseudonyms for reasons known only to them.

Four Tet, real name Kieran Hebden, plays massive sold-out gigs alongside fellow giants Skrillex and Fred Again.., but he also produces under a series of unpronounceable artist names that are downright daunting to type into a streaming service: 00110100 01010100, △▃△▓, and ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ.

The use of these impenetrable alternate titles shows the kind of audience impact an artist can create by picking up a pseudonym. Four Tet’s most popular songs generally reach the 30–40 million play mark, and his monthly listeners generally fluctuate between 1.7–5.6 million.

Despite sharing sonic continuity with the rest of his work, though, the music produced under these alter egos is streamed significantly less frequently. In Chartmetric's history, none of the projects have cracked 400k monthly listeners on Spotify. Furthermore, the most popular releases under his projects △▃△▓ and 00110100 01010100 both have fewer than 3 million plays, with the average track teetering around a few hundred thousand. His unicode-based name ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ is the most widely-streamed of these alter egos — possibly because the name is so ridiculous that it brings some extra curiosity to the table. 

Hebden’s use of many alter egos is now one of the signature elements of his oeuvre. And while he makes no secret about his authorship — all of his different side projects are collected in his “Everything” playlist on Spotify — these pseudonyms still provide a certain barrier to entry for casual fans, as seen in the difference in their streaming numbers. Using different artist names offers something new and strange for people to explore as they dig into his work. 

Yung Lean and Jonatan Leandoer

Releasing a goofy novelty record under a new name is a time-honored tradition in rock music. In one of the most infamous cases, Ramones bassist Dee Dee Ramone took up the moniker “Dee Dee King” and released the bizarre pseudo-hip-hop record Standing in the Spotlight in 1989.

However, it’s less common when novelty gives way to more serious music, including things under a different name. Yung Lean’s first big hit was, to a certain extent, a novelty hit. His popular single "Ginseng Strip 2002," which has over 300 million Spotify plays, was released in 2013 when Lean — real name Jonatan Leandoer — was just 16 years old. The song features Leandoer describing comically perverse sexual fantasies and drug use in a tuneless monotone over a looping sample.

Leandoer grew into a more outwardly serious artist with age, with albums like Warlord and Stranger receiving critical praise for their lyrical sincerity and vulnerability. “Agony,” a heartbreaking single off of Stranger, is responsible for a TikTok trend that peaked in 2022. 

Leandoer's musical styles aren’t limited to the rap and pop of his Yung Lean persona, as he began releasing music under his birth name and year — jonatan leandoer96 — that shows off his singer-songwriter and pop-rock sensibilities. While his music as jonatan leandoer96 has a different sound and subject matter, it retains his earnest, unstudied, accented singing voice. The quirky sound led to a couple of successful singles for this self-styled alter ego: “Wooden Girl,” which has more than 7 million Spotify plays, and “Hotel in Minsk,” with more than 12 million.

As if to go a level further away from the sound of his main persona, Leandoer also leads the post-punk side project Död Mark with the producer Gud, in which he sings stripped-down rock in his native Swedish. Despite the language and the more raw acoustic style, Yung Lean’s popularity still translates somewhat to Död Mark, contributing to a single song — “Min Dag” — with over 4 million plays.

While "Hotel in Minsk" and "Min Dag" have such smaller stream counts compared to "Ginseng Strip 2002," that song is the viral outlier. The numbers are far more comparable to Leandoer's other top originals such as "Kyoto," "Agony," "Red Bottom Sky," and "Yoshi City," which range from 47.9–81.3 million.

There are some artists with voices — literal or figurative — that stand out despite what they call themselves. Pseudonyms have been part of the music industry since pop statistics began focusing on branding, offering a potential escape from their main personality that is more scrutinized than ever because of social media. While the internet builds a different relationship between musicians and their audience, it’s still true to this day that a fake name has its place. 

Visualizations by Harry Levin; Cover image by Crasianne Tirado