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There must be other examples, but you're right in the famous case of Prince changing his name to an abstract symbol to get round a contractual issue he was having with his record label. Apparently journalists started saying "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" though apparently it didn't stick? Unfortunately I'm not enough of a Prince fan to know what his fans did?

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/featu...

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It stuck enough. I'm not really a Prince fan, but "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" is what people called him for pretty much my whole childhood. He didn't use the name "Prince" 1993-2000, but it's my recollection that a lot of people kept calling him "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" well in to the mid 200x's. Sure, eventually people went back to calling him just "Prince" once he was using that name again, but "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" absolutely did stick for a number of years.

There is also a band named , or something to that effect. I used to have quite a nice album from them but I can't find it now (I'm not even sure if those are the correct Unicode block symbols).

I think intentionally being obscure is kind of the point for a lot of these things.

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