The Artist Official Website plugin retrieves Artist information, and (for its own use only) caches this to avoid repeated webservice calls for the same information.

There are likely other plugins that might want Artist information.

As discussed in PICARD-535 we should create an Artist API whereby plugins can request specific types of data for a specific Artist MBID, and then Picard will get the data if necessary and cache it, and return the specified data to the plugin.