I have been thinking that it would be quite cool to do create a database of which artists were inspired by other artists. Kind of like a more granular http://www.musicmap.info/, or http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/ , on a per-artist basis, rather than per-genre.
This would basically require an Artist-Artist relationship, “inspired by”, which would obviously need to have references (e.g. links to artist interviews, etc.)
The database would be a very interesting way to map the history of music evolution.