Combining Tags

Hello, I know I've been making post after post, but I have a questions about the tagging system.

Let's say you have a tag for a band, we'll say 'Nine Inch Nails.' But if people want to follow everything related to the artist Trent Reznor, they would have to follow not only Nine Inch Nails but Trent Reznor, as well as the other musical projects he is involved with.

We thought that making one unified slug across multiple tags might solve this issue but we got the "duplicate slug" error. Is there a way to "merge" tags so that someone just needs to follow one unified tag to follow all related ones? That really should have been available from the start. Not going to mince words here, the tagging system is really undercooked. I had to buy two separate modules just to make the tagging system functional on an organizational level. (Tag Page and Tag Suggestions [so members could 'add' their own tags for admin approval]).