No, this isn't a tutorial on 1984-esque control of the media. It's more of reputation management in the online world. As soon as your band starts to take off, there are some web sites that you need to establish yourself on. If you miss the opportunity you may risk someone else registering as you and saying things that may not help your cause. You can lose some fans if the impostor says or does something that pisses people off.

In addition, most of these sites let you add a link to your homepage, which helps the search engines to figure out which site is the authority. Let's assume that your band's name is "Suppository Hallucinogen" and that you want to make sure that no one steals your band's online identity. Here's the steps I would take:

• Register http://www.suppositoryhallucinogen.com and http://www.suppositoryhallucinogenband.com, as well as those domain names with .net and .org top-level domains. Have whoever is setting everything up to do a 301 redirect to your main site (http://www.suppositoryhallucinogen.com in this case). Then, when someone types or links to any of those different URLs, it will automatically redirect them to your main site.
• Sign up on MySpace as suppositoryhallucinogen. Link back to your real domain.
• Sign up on Facebook as suppositoryhallucinogen. Link back to your real domain.
• Sign up on Del.icio.us as suppositoryhallucinogen. Tag your main site with keywords that describes your band: Dallas, rock, band, music.
• Register a Gmail account of your band: suppositoryhallucinogen@gmail.com suppositoryhallucinogen@gmail.com. Set it up to forward to the email address(es) that you check.
• Sign up for accounts at Flickr and Picasa. Upload pictures of your band to both.
• Sign up for accounts at YouTube and Google Video. Upload any videos of your band to both, and make sure to link back to your main site.
• Create a last.fm account for you. Install their scrobber extension for iTunes and listen to one of your mp3s. Add information about your band and your picture. You can also upload mp3s to the service to help build an internet fan base.
• Write an honest and truthful piece about your band on Wikipedia. Don't make it full of fluff, just a little history and who's in the band.
• Create a Squidoo Lense for your band. Link to all of your new web properties.
• Add links to your MySpace and Facebook site from your main web site.

These steps will help to ensure that you control the official name of your band on those popular sites, as well as helping to rank your site higher in the rankings for your band name. The more active you are on all of these sites the more 'link love' your get from the search engines, and helps to make sure that when someone searches for your band name, they will find you first.