Back when Prince started going by an unpronounceable symbol, who was the first person to refer to him as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince?
I think that it was Prince.
I am pretty sure that is correct. He announced he was changing his name and wanted to be referred to as that, which folks immediately shortened to TAFKAP and The Glyph.
Since it was an obvious attempt to piss off Warner Bros and get out of his contract, it was amusiing to watch folks scratch their heads. And since Prince is crazy the way physicist Richard Feynman was crazy - i.e., a genius and if we don’t get him, it’s our problem - folks were willing to roll with it.
This is very rude usage: if someone changes their name you should either refer to them by their new name or not refer to them at all–rather than some garbage like “the person former known as X”. If someone doesn’t have the ability to do the first the obvious alternative is to do the second.
Nice user/post combo.
Here’s a partial timeline, though it’s not definitive as to who first came up with it.
The pretentious little freak was asking for it. 
I remember my friends and I just calling him Squiggle.
His Mama name him Prince, I’ma call him Prince.
We called him “Dingbat”, which had the added advantage of being accurate.
If you watch the credits for Fargo, one of the motorists Peter Stormare murders after he kills the cop uses Prince’s logo instead of his name.
One has to wonder what his royalty checks look like.
I seem to recall reading an article at the time that said Ticketmaster started using the “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince” because they couldn’t print the symbol on his concert tickets.
That makes no sense at all. Do you honestly think that 1993 technology was so rudimentary that they couldn’t print a symbol on a concert ticket? Totally ridiculous.
If they’re like any other business, these tickets were probably being printed out on some old HP printer that was built early in the Reagan administation.
So, yeah, not being able to print the symbol was likely a bit of a problem 
So no one can buy tickets to his concerts. I don’t see the problem.
I know that you’re making a joke but I have been to many hundreds of concerts over the last three decades and I have plenty of pre-1993 Ticketmaster stubs have symbols on them.
It would have been a problem all through their system though. An artist not having an alphanumeric name would cause a whole host of problems.