However, they benefitted greatly in the early ‘00s. If you had them in your Apple Music library, iTunes always put them at the top of your alphabetical music library, keeping them top of mind, ! comes before A. There might have a similar iTunes Store benefit too.
In 1997 Torsten Pröfrock released a highly sought-after dub techno album on the legendary Chain Reaction label under the name "Various Artists". It's a quintessential record in the Basic Channel genre. You can listen it here: https://youtu.be/3165Sf-q8dY
SiriusXM truncates a "The" prefix from artist names (so "The Cure" and "The Who" become "Cure" and "Who"). I always wondered how it would display The The. Would it be "The The" (special case), "The" (default removal of "The"), or an empty string "" (in the unlikely case the algorithm recursively removed "The" prefixes)? Eventually they played a The The song and the answer is "The The".
There’s a video on YouTube with three full-width explanation points as the title. I watched it once, and although it wasn’t particularly interesting, it bugs me that I cannot find it again.
Terrible Google SEO, great accidental Apple SEO.