As Austin undergoes shifts in the city’s industry and economic makeup, many stories have been written covering racial and ethnic changes that have been associated with these shifts.
Lower income individuals and families are being forced out of the city as prices skyrocket in the presence of new tech sector companies and jobs. Unfortunately, minority groups make up larger percentages of this financial demographic which means that as the city loses its affordable housing and services, it’s losing its diversity.
I would love to examine whether this loss of diversity in the city is mirrored in the city’s world-renowned music scene. I’m interested in two aspects – whether bands with minority members are getting more or fewer bookings than majority white bands and whether music genres with historically minority ethnic roots are performed at a greater or lesser degree than mainstream genres.
Potentially very luckily, there is an excellent project 
underway in Austin right now that could yield a great amount of useful data for such a project. The city of Austin, with the help of consulting agency Titan Music Group, is launching the first-ever
music industry census. This will survey many different workers associated with the music industry and, being a census, will hopefully gather some amount of ethnic background information on all surveyed in order to track certain trends. Being a music census, I expect they will also be asking some general questions about what genre bands belong to if respondents are members of bands. Survey updates are being released at www.atxmusic.org
The survey window has not closed yet and so no bulk data is yet available, but much as the US Census site provides an enormous amount of usable data, I’m sure this census data will be well organized for public use and analysis. It may be downloadable but more likely is in table or excel form, which can be scraped.
I think that the easiest and best visualization for data like this would be a map, much like the heat maps other have mentioned tracking what genres of music are most popular in which parts of the country. 