pronouns

So I've been wondering about which pronoun to use with a band. Or on a similar vein which "be" verb (is, are) to use. I came up with three ways to think of it.

The first way is to use the number of people in the band. This will designate most bands as plural because that's basically the common definition of a band. There are solo artists that record under a band name, but a majority of bands have more than one person. Therefore I don't think that this is a very effective way of... classifying?

The second way is to say "it" and "is" all the time because you are referring to a band. A band is a group of people, and therefore it is singular. i.e. "the band is...". I also don't like this approach because it doesn't account for discrepancies such as in the third case.

The third approach, which I prefer, is to look at the name of the band and go from there. For example, Stars is plural, so you would say "Stars are...". Modest Mouse is singular, so you would use the appropriate form with that.

Really it's not that big of a deal, and there probably isn't one right way to say it, but I usually prefer to use the third method. When it doesn't apply because the band name isn't a noun, I defer to the first method, using the number of people. The second method I use sort of exclusively when I start out by saying "the band" instead of the artist name. You can still say "Stars IS...", but it sounds sort of funny.