I was thinking about how record stores sort their albums typically by the last name of the artist or the first word of the band name, after any genre sorting and excluding “the” and “a”. Then I thought about band names where it’s named after a person in the band, and how those might get sorted if those are counted as band names or artist names. The one that came to mind was The Alan Parsons Project. Here’s how I see that being sorted in certain scenarios.
If it goes under “The”, then the sorter is probably a basic computer file browser that doesn’t account for usually ignored words for alphabetization. I’m not sure what file browsers actually account for this. Yet for whatever reason the default one I have on my main Linux machine ignores things like underscores and parentheses and goes by the first alphanumeric character, which that I find weird. I’m usually wanting to use those characters to put frequently-accessed or otherwise important files toward the top of the list but that doesn’t seem to apply there.
If it goes under “Alan”, then the sorter either treats this as a band name or just wants to sort everything by its first letter past any usually ignored words. The latter is my personal case, where I just tend to sort my CDs by the first “important” letters of the artist just to make it easier on myself and not worry about specifics on who’s a band or artist name. Though I also sort out decade/year-based compilations and the general compilations and soundtracks separately before alphabetizing. I don’t really sort by genre beyond that as that would be more of a pain since genres are a bit fluid in practice and I’m also open to a lot of genres.
If it goes under “Parsons”, then the sorter treats this as a typical name. I haven’t really looked for albums from The Alan Parsons Project myself so I can’t say what I usually see out there for this specific scenario, but as I mentioned record stores, or at least places that sell albums, sort by last name where available. I’m also sure that they’ll group albums from both Prince and The Artist Formerly Known As Prince together despite that being the last word in the latter.
If it goes under “Project”, then I’m not sure what the sorter is thinking. Could be a strange or incomplete algorithm that just grabs whatever the last word in the artist name is and considers that a last name. Otherwise I’m not sure why someone would do this unless they’re just screwing with someone, maybe themselves.