What do the "sort" options do in iTunes?

Question

I've found lots of questions similar to the one I am asking, but none of them seem to explain in a straight-forward manner what the options do. Please could you tell me in the simplest way possible what the following options do.
Sort Artist.
Sort Album Artist.
Sort Album.
Sort Composer.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

These options specify which field is used for determining the order in which music is displayed.  These are 4 fields in the tagging of songs.  The ones that are pretty much always set are:
  Album:  Album Name
   Artist: Artist on *this* song
The other two are often left blank
  Album Artist:  This is a single artist name to keep tracks from albums with different artists on different tracks from being split up and displayed in different places.  It is often set to "Various Artists" or maybe one artist name when some of the tracks have guest artists in the "Artist" field.
  Composer:  Generally used for classical music, where you might be more likely to care that Mozart composed a song rather than which symphony was playing it.
The default is to sort by for it to sort first by Album Artist (which will use "Artist" if "Album Artist" is blank) and then by "Album". 
To find out the value of the fields, right-click->Get Info on the song in iTunes.