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I recently discovered that the singular "band" can go together with plural verbs.

"band goes on tour" gets 11,700 results on google while "band go on tour" gets 31,900 results.

What's going on here?

user498283
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    You are not comparing equal settings."Tomorrow the band goes on tour." That's okay. "Does the band go on tour?" Yes, and that's also okay. – Yosef Baskin Mar 13 '17 at 20:56
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    Band may be singular, but a band consists of more than one person. That makes it a notional plural, and notional plurals can (optionally) take notional agreement/concord (note how band is even the word used in the Wikipedia article). It’s a regular feature of English, though it’s more common in British English than American English. @Yosef Even if you use “the band [is/are] on tour” as your data set, the numbers are reasonably even. I get 257,000 hits for the former and 153,000 for the latter. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Mar 13 '17 at 21:02
  • @janus - The popularity of one form over the other says little to me unless we compare true equals. Finding more apples than oranges does not make one fruit better. – Yosef Baskin Mar 13 '17 at 21:11
  • @YosefBaskin I never said anything about one being better than the other. I was only saying that this is not only a case of one getting more hits because it can appear in more constructions. I don't see how “the band is/are on tour” isn’t an equal pairing, though. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Mar 13 '17 at 21:15
  • You are right about your pairing. The question was about band go on tour compared with bad goes. – Yosef Baskin Mar 13 '17 at 21:24

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This differs relative to US/UK. Where are you?

The New York Yankees is my favorite team. (OK in the US.)

but

Manchester United are my favourite club. (OK in the UK.)

GEdgar
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