I know about this music website that could be very useful in terms of research.
Last.fm is a music website, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Using a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler",
Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording
details of the songs the user listens to, either from Internet radio stations, or the user's computer or many portable music
devices. This information is transferred ("scrobbled") to
Last.fm's database either via the music player itself or via a plugin installed into the user's music player.
The data is then displayed on the user's profile page and also compiled to
create reference pages for individual artists. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play
artists similar to the user's favourites. [Wikipedia]
What is interesting about the website is how you can research about artists and genres.
For example, if you search for a 'tag' of a specific genre, the website will provide you a range of different artists from that genre. There is also a radio in which some songs are available to be listened to for free (for users in UK, U.S and Germany only). In this image you can see how they show the top artists for the genre 'indie' and offer some possible related tags like 'indie pop' as nowadays genres very much overlap. You can click to 'See more' to see a full list of artists classified under that genre.
If you search for an artist the website offer quite a lot of information as well. It includes some background information about the artist, pictures, how many registered users listen to that artist, tags of genres that the artist might belong to, it shows if they are on tour, their albums, videos, top tracks and it even shows other artists that are similar to that one. I believe that there is some data and some information in the website that could be useful when researching artists and genres, as well as audience. For example, you can see how many registered users listen to that artist and even the favourite tracks and albums by the listeners (measured via amount os 'scrobbles')
How can the website be useful to research audience as well? Because the users can leave 'comments' on the artists page, participate of 'groups' where they can discuss about music, and we can also investigate their profiles. There is even a data of the 'Top Listeners' in each artist's page.
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