A growing music debate: Band vs. brand. Here’s what that means

Let's ask the question again: How many original members must a band feature before it stops becoming that band? What we have is a 'band vs. brand' situation.

Come next May 26 in Moncton, N.B., Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman will kick off a national tour under the name The Guess Who. The last time they played a show like this was July 30, 2003 for SARSfest in Toronto.

Why so long? Because each of them left The Guess Who before it was done.

Randy exited in 1970 and Burton in 1975, and the group carried on with bass player Jim Kale and drummer Garry Peterson. It was Kale who realized that there was no clear ownership of the name “The Guess Who,” so he filed for its trademark in the U.S. in 1986 without telling Burton or Randy. The group continued without its two main players and songwriters.

And it got weirder. Kale stopped appearing with The Guess Who in 2016 and Peterson was semi-retired, appearing with the band only once in a while. Fans turning up to see the band saw and heard a performance from musicians who had no connection to the original group. The name was the same. The songs were the same. The members of the band were not.

In 2023, both Cummings and Bachman sued to get the name back, saying that this version of The Guess Who was “nothing more than a cover band,” and did nothing to disabuse audiences of the fact that Cummings and Bachman were no longer with the group. Kale and Peterson fought back, arguing a form of “you snooze, you lose,” saying that the statute of limitations on trademark disputes had long passed.

The good news is that everything was settled in September 2024. The trademark is now owned jointly by Cummings and Bachman, enabling them to embark on this 2026 tour officially as The Guess Who.

This is an example of the “band vs. brand” debate that’s only getting louder, something that I first starting writing about in 2022. How many original members does a band need in order for it to legitimately market itself as that group? Two? One? None?

Musical nostalgia continues to be a major moneymaker, and artists are still touring into their 70s and even 80s. However, members of those acts are being claimed by the calamities of old age, if not the Grim Reaper.