Assuming a music library use case, one could address it with UI alone (making the the method of grouping under the hood an implementation detail) with “merge artist” and “merge album” functions surfaced in places like the context menu that appears when right-clicking an artist/album.
You just have to have a binary ID and maybe "pronunciation" fields too, for each song/album/artist entities in the database schema, that are on UI sanitized/normalized by searches and loose matches.
It's not worth dealing with regularization and mapping rules between ASCII and whatever artists insist on using, like slightly different style of T used only in Western East Antarctic. It'll be just a String whatever.
That way each files may keep whatever emojis used specifically for any specific distribution channels without troubles.
I "solved" this years ago by (ab)using the artistsort key for this. Regardless of how the artist name is spelled, their tracks are listed sequentially. But my player uses a flat list, not an hierarchical structure.
