The Best Wedding Bands: Should I Trust Google and AI?
Asking Google or ChatGPT which are the best wedding bands in your area (ours is Sicily) can certainly give a couple a first indication: a few relevant names to look into before moving on to the next stage of the selection.
Lists found this way, however, carry all the limits of the selection criteria and algorithms of these ubiquitous digital robots. They will favor bands with a long-standing, well-rooted presence on the web, those with lots of “backlinks” on other portals or on the websites of suppliers such as wedding planners and caterers, and those with lots of comments on their YouTube channel. In short, the whole assessment made by an LLM or a search engine is purely “virtual”, digital only, tightly bound to the world of the internet, and it does not necessarily match the real world.
Entrepreneur? No, musician!
For many years, a large share of people working in show business ignored the marketing and advertising potential of the internet and preferred to keep relying on established, familiar advertising channels, from word of mouth to specialized agencies.
Many bands then ventured (often late) into the maze of the web by relying exclusively on the big aggregator portals, which have the advantage of giving their member musicians an established platform with countless daily visits. It is a legitimate and understandable way to hand off to others the technical problems of marketing, SEO (search engine optimization) and every other technical aspect of running a web presence, and to focus only on the music, which is demanding enough already: playing well, presenting yourself well, having a wide repertoire and plenty of experience in the field. No small thing.
Unfortunately, their more than understandable rejection of the technical side and of “digital entrepreneurship” has had a series of unpleasant consequences, for musicians and their clients alike.
Musicians put all their marketing resources into the portals, handing over to them the management of this advertising and their entire web presence, without the slightest control over their ranking in search engines and in the increasingly important searches that couples and potential clients now make with the help of AI (LLMs such as ChatGPT or Gemini, or the AI “summaries” at the top of Google’s results, the AI Overviews, and AI Mode).
In short, the big portal with its endless list of bands has, on the one hand, relieved musicians of the burden of technology, but on the other it has left them to fend for themselves, in the fond illusion that their internet presence would be looked after in the best possible way by the aggregator portal.
Why an illusion? Simple: while for the vast majority of bands the big portal is the only source of their web presence, and the only source of authority in the rankings, this is not the case for search engines, with or without AI. For them, portals certainly matter a great deal, but not exclusively.
YouTube comments count, Reddit counts, a band’s own website and its backlinks on other people’s websites count, and years of activity on the web count. Many other parameters beyond a plain and simple “shop window” in someone else’s house.
The band’s “digital” seniority
Google and AI give a great deal of weight to how many years a band has been on the web, with a dedicated website, a profile on the major aggregator portals, videos on a YouTube channel.
Naturally, this is an indirect sign of the band’s solidity and evidence of its professional experience: in all likelihood, it is not a makeshift, short-lived band.
On the other hand, saying that the bands with the most digital seniority are the “best” is rather inaccurate.
First of all, Google might promote, and put at the top of the list, YouTube content from line-ups that no longer exist: a video can stay online for decades after a band has broken up.
Second, bands with a long online history have sometimes simply been quicker to respond to new technology, and seized with good timing the new opportunities offered by a very low-cost internet presence. Well done! But that does not necessarily translate into better music.
After all, a band’s digital seniority and its real seniority are not connected at all: a band can have existed for 15 years but have had its own web presence for just one year.
Finally, digital seniority almost always refers to a name, a brand, and rarely to a musician as a person. In other words, a historic brand gets rewarded and put at the top of the list even if its members have changed several times over the years, bringing a change in quality or even in style (invisible to Google’s robots), while the individual musicians who make up the band, their experience and their real musical talent are ignored.
Presence and quality
I couldn’t say whether it is a good or a bad thing that Google and ChatGPT (or whoever stands in for them) do not make value judgments about bands and their music, but that’s how it is: for them quantity comes before quality, and a long-standing presence is a value in itself.
Of course, an AI today goes into far more detail than a traditional search engine or an old-fashioned internet “directory” (like the historic Yahoo). It can, for example, read the reviews and ratings that clients leave on websites and portals: the research available suggests it tends to recommend businesses with more stars and more reviews, pushing them up in its answers.
Except that ratings can be steered. Reviews can be requested only from the happiest clients, and every YouTube channel owner decides the fate of negative comments under their own videos. Some leave them, as proof of a pressing need to grow musically and artistically; others simply remove them, artificially boosting their “sentiment score”.
The bottom line: should I trust them or not?
All in all, I’d say no. Both traditional search engines and “AI-powered” ones use formal ranking criteria that are largely misleading and say nothing about the real quality of the music and of the service offered.
Following the points listed so far, an AI’s notion of the “best band” is more or less this: “a band with a web presence of at least 5 to 10 years, a frantic round of phone calls to other suppliers to get backlinks on their websites, lots of five-star reviews, lots of YouTube videos with lots of positive comments kept and all the negative ones removed, a few hundred euros spent on a professional to handle the SEO of its website, and finally a massive presence on the aggregator portals, obtained through considerable monthly fees”.
Do you still want to rely on the opinion of Google and AI?
How to really judge a band
If algorithms do not measure the music, it is up to you to measure it. Six things to ask for and to check before deciding:
- Whole videos, not just the promo. A thirty-second montage tells you little: ask for at least one complete song, filmed live at a real event, with the line-up that will play at your wedding.
- Who really plays. Ask what happens if one of the musicians cannot make it: a well-organized group already has a substitute and confirms it to you in writing.
- A real conversation. The first meeting, even by video call, should be about you: your day, the moments, the songs you care about. If it is only about date and price, you have a price list, not a musical project.
- Reviews read in full. Stars matter less than words: look for detailed accounts from real couples, on several sources, and ask whether you can speak to a couple who already had them play.
- A clear quote. Length, breaks, sound system and travel must be in writing: be wary of a quote that gives you no detail.
- A test in the field. If you can, go and hear them live, or ask whether they have already played in a venue similar to yours.
So what should you do?
In this article I have only touched in passing on specialized portals, which today are one of the main sources of information and evaluation for clients and couples looking for a band for an event or for their wedding. Here too the discussion would be very long and would need an article of its own.
What is certain, though, is that, statistically speaking, the first alternative to the searches we have discussed so far is precisely searching on dedicated portals: lots of choice, aggregated results, reviews from other clients who used that service in the past.
So are these portals THE answer? I can’t tell you in a couple of words: it takes, precisely, an article dedicated to dedicated portals. I’ll get to it. For now, just know that whoever is most visible on these portals is neither the most skilled nor the best-looking: it’s whoever has paid the most. Sigh. We know it first-hand: we ourselves are on some of these portals, as paying members.
But I’d like to end this article on a positive note, with an added value offered by these very portals, but also by good old YouTube (or by Vimeo, for those obsessed with technical quality), and even by bands’ own websites. Beyond the words, the rankings, the sentiment scores and all the algorithmic gadgets we will come up with in the years ahead, each of these digital containers holds an irreplaceable source of knowledge and evaluation that reaches you through your eyes and ears: the bands’ videos. Those fantastic moving images, with the sound of the instruments and the voice of the frontman, played straight from your computer speakers or from the JBL GO connected via Bluetooth to your smartphone, will give you the best possible evidence of what is missing from the AI’s matrices: the quality of the music, and how it resonates with your own, entirely personal, sense of beauty.
Until, of course, Veo 3.2 and Kling 3.1 make you doubt those too.
If you are choosing the music for your wedding, in the meantime you can read how much a band costs and what the quote depends on, keep the anti-mishap music checklist at hand, look at the line-ups to choose from, from duo to quintet, and the frequently asked questions.
