Frequency of distinct values in a column

[forumreader]

Let's say I have a column full of values of something, like band names:

Band names

Poison
Beatles
Metallica
Beatles
Beatles
Poison

Is there a query that I can run that will give me the frequency/occurrence of each distinct value in that column in descending order?

For example, for the column above it would give:

Beatles 3
Poison 2
Metallica 1

Thanks for any help, I'm a SQL beginner and this has me perplexed...

[bradgrafelman]

Hmm.. maybe something like this?

SELECT `band_name`, COUNT(`band_name`) FROM `myTable` GROUP BY `band_name`

[forumreader]

This is close, it gives the right frequency for the right listing, now I just have to get it to do it in descending order of frequency. Will I be able to do that from the query, or does that need to happen later when I go into my while loop to print the results?

[bradgrafelman]

You can do that in the query... I would add an alias to the COUNT() function (add "AS alias_name" after the COUNT() function) and then you can use that alias in an ORDER BY statement.