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DNCE

The name of Joe Jonas’ band, known for the hit “Cake by the Ocean,” is a play on the word “dance,” despite being pronounced like an acronym. "DNCE is dance without an A, which is not a perfect word, but you don't have to be a perfect dancer to dance in life,” guitarist JinJoo Lee told InStyle. “Sometimes it is never perfect, but you can still enjoy life."

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Arcade Fire

Frontman Win Butler told Gothamist the name originated from his school bully. “The first kid who beat me up when I was 12, was a high school kid who always used to talk about how the old arcade burned down and all these kids died,” he said.

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Imagine Dragons

The band members have said the name is an anagram, but they’ve refused to reveal of what words it’s comprised. “We haven’t even told our families,” lead vocalist Dan Reynolds told Radio.com, saying the phrase “had meaning” to the group. “We just thought it would be cool to keep something to ourselves, because you’re always exposing yourself as an artist.”

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5 Seconds of Summer

There’s not much to this one. "The name came from... I remember, like, we were in science class when we were probably 15 and just writing a bunch of names on a piece of paper. We weren't paying any attention to anything the teacher was saying," the group’s Calum Hood told 60 Minutes. Band member "Michael [Clifford] texted us — he was like, 'How 'bout the name 5 Seconds of Summer? And we were like, 'Yeah, alright, that's fun…’ When you're in a band in school, you never really think it's going to amount to much."

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Destiny's Child

Buzzfeed once speculated that the group was secretly always Tina Knowles’s and that she subliminally got Beyoncé a solo career because Destiny’s Child does sound quite a bit like “Das Tina’s Child.” In reality, the name is biblical. "We got the word destiny out of the bible, but we couldn't trademark the name, so we added child, which is like a rebirth of destiny,” Bey told CBS in 2002.

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Coldplay

Originally going by the name Starfish, Chris Martin’s band was friends with another band called Coldplay, named after Philip Horky’s poetry collection, Child’s Reflections, Cold Play. When that band gave up the name, Chris Martin’s band asked if they could use it.

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Nickelback

Every music lover’s favorite punching bag got its name from bass player Mike Kroeger’s job at Starbucks. As he gave customers their change, he’d tell them, “Here’s your nickel back.”

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Maroon 5

Adam Levine has vowed never to reveal the name’s meaning. "The origin of the name is so bad,” he told David Letterman. “It's such a horrendous story that we decided that shrouding it in mystery will make it a better story than the actual story." One popular theory, though, is that the name is in reference to Long Island’s Five Towns College, which Levine attended, and has the school colors of white and maroon.

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The Killers

Brandon Flowers confirmed in a 2013 concert that the group took its name from the band New Order’s music video for their song “Crystal.” In the video, “The Killers” is emblazoned on a bass drum.

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Walk the Moon

Lead singer Nicholas Petricca told Interview Magazine that the band—known for the smash hit “Shut Up and Dance”—derived the name from The Police’s song “Walking on the Moon.” “The Police definitely have a mystery and playfulness that we try to have as well,” he said.

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Fall Out Boy

Patrick Stump, Pete Wentz, and the gang got their title from The Simpsons. On the show, Fallout Boy was a fictional character within their world, the sidekick to the comic book hero Radioactive Man.

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Backstreet Boys

The “I Want It That Way” singers were named by their creator, Lou Pearlman. He brought them together in Florida and labeled them after an Orlando flea market, according to Vanity Fair.

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The Chainsmokers

One half of the duo, Andrew Taggart, spilled the beans in an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit. Asked why they chose the name, he responded, “honestly, we never thought it was all going to be this big. alex [Alex Pall] used to smoke, seemed clever and the domains were open hahaha... we do love it...but no baby formula advertisements for us sadly cause of it.”

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Spice Girls

Geri Halliwell came up with the name during an aerobics class because the girls were “all really different” and they’d also already recorded a song called “Sugar and Spice,” according to a timeline on the official Spice Girls website. As for the girls’ individual monikers (Scary, Sporty, Baby, Ginger, and Posh), Mel B told The Huffington Post they originated in an article in the British magazine Top of the Pops. “It was actually a lazy journalist that couldn’t be bothered to remember all our names, so he just gave us nicknames,” Mel B said. “And we were like, ‘Oh, well, that kind of works. I don’t mind my name. Do you like your name? Baby? Posh?’ We were like, ‘Let’s just go with it.’”

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Foo Fighters

The term “foo fighters” was used during World War II for sighted UFOs, and Dave Grohl was reading up on them while he was putting together the Foo Fighters’ first tape. "I had recorded the first record by myself, playing all the instruments, but I wanted people to think that it was a group, [so] I figured that Foo Fighters might lead people to believe that it was more than just one guy,” Grohl told Clash Magazine. “Silly, huh?"

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Boyz II Men

The R&B vocal group is named after a song from their predecessors, the R&B group New Edition. New Edition’s 1988 album Heart Break concludes with the track, “Boys to Men.”

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Red Hot Chili Peppers

Frontman Anthony Kiedis revealed the story behind the band’s name in his 2004 memoir, Scar Tissue. “We started going through these huge laundry lists of idiotic, meaningless, boring names,” he wrote. “To this day both [former member Keith “Tree” Barry] and Flea claim they came up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It's a derivation of a classic old-school American blues or jazz name. There was Louis Armstrong with his Hot Five, and also other bands that had “Red Hot” this or “Chili” that. But no one had ever been the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a name that would forever be a blessing and a curse.”

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Green Day

Billie Joe Armstrong recalled the 4/20-friendly origin of the punk band’s name to Time: “I wrote a song called ‘Green Day’ because I was smoking a lot of dope. Our drummer put Green Day on his jacket and said, ‘Maybe we should call the band that.’ And I said, ‘That's a good idea.’"

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Migos

The rap trio’s name is a shortening of the Spanish word “amigos” for “friends,” but Quavo told the radio station Hot 97 it also refers to the drug trade where they’re from. “It's the hub of drugs out there, so everything that comes to Georgia got to touch Gwinnett [their home county] first, so we just call it Migos,” he said.

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Mumford & Sons

The band’s lead vocalist is named Marcus Mumford, but none of the other members are his spawn. So what’s the deal? “It just made sense as an antiquated family-business name,” keyboardist Ben Lovett told Entertainment Weekly, adding that Marcus got top billing because he was the one “making the phone calls and getting the gigs.”

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