slashes in url variables

You could easily replace the forward slashes / with something like an underscore _ such as Wikipedia uses for spaces. Replacing special characters with underscores, etc., is common practice.

You need to escape the slashes as %2F.

Check out this w3schools page about "HTML URL Encoding Reference": https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp

for / you would escape with %2F

You need to escape those but don't just replace it by %2F manually. You can use URLEncoder for this.

Eg URLEncoder.encode(url, "UTF-8")

Then you can say

yourUrl = "www.musicExplained/index.cfm/artist/" + URLEncoder.encode(VariableName, "UTF-8")