Periphery Demographic / Music

• George Michael was a gay white British man who had a huge following amongst African-American males. It helped that he, at his core, had a soul voice and was able to pull off both slow jams ("Father Figure") and funky dance tracks ("Monkey").
• Taylor Swift had a large following of young adult males when she was marketed to teenage girls. Now that her fans are adults, she has a large LGBT fanbase (especially post-reputation). Prior to her coming out of the political closet for the 2018 midterm elections, people on both sides of the political spectrum (the left and the right) took her silence on sociopolitical issues to mean she agreed with whatever they believed in.
• They Might Be Giants started out aiming at two separate audiences: New York hipsters and college-age alternative rock fans. But from the beginning, they've always managed to attract a huge cult following among teens. Then, when their original fans got older and started playing TMBG to their kids, the band was surprised to discover that they had a lot preteen fans too. Since then, they've started doing child-oriented work (albums, DVDs, kids-only concerts, even some stuff for Disney) alongside their usual stuff. However, they've made a point of making their children's music accessible to their adult fans too.
  • This hasn't stopped people from complaining.
• The Beatles gained a large crop of child fans with the animated movie Yellow Submarine, an inversion of the usual Animation Age Ghetto situation. In fact, George Harrison claimed that was how his own son came to know of the Beatles, since Harrison hadn't yet informed his son that he'd been in one of the most popular bands of all time.
  • The Beatles' more innocent and silly songs have also been frequently recorded specifically as children's songs. "Octopus' Garden" is a major target ^note  Ringo Starr later adapted it into a children's book , as is the iconic "Yellow Submarine" song itself.
• Before Michael Jackson's death, his "This Is It" concerts were stated to be an oldies act by the news media who expected mostly people in their 40s and up to be buying tickets. However, most of the people who actually bought tickets to the concerts were people in their 20s who became fans long after Michael's heyday, probably because the 2009–2010 concerts would have been the first concerts for many of Jackson's millennial fans while many of his baby boomer and Gen X fans watched his concerts multiple times in the 80s and 90s. In fact, Michael retained a relatively young audience, especially females, throughout his entire solo career, which is very rare for an older act.
  • He has also attracted not a small amount of Heavy Metal fans, thanks to Beat It (which even featured Eddie Van Halen), something unheard of for pop stars.
• Madonna is another example. She is marketed towards a female audience, but her biggest market is largely in the gay community. Also, like Michael, since she changes her format and looks every five or so years, she constantly has a fresh audience to perform for.
  • Cher is also inordinately popular with gay men, as is Barbra Streisand.
• Many fans in the western side of the world inexplicably fail to realize that Hello! Project fandom is meant to include both ninth-grade girls and college-age guys.
• Emilie Autumn, despite probably, along with Otep, being the closest thing to Riot Grrrl the Turn of the Millennium had, has a rather large male fanbase; according to a survey, as many as 60% of her fans were male. She has acknowledged this, calling them her "Asylum Boys".
• For most of the 1980s and 1990s, Johnny Cash was thought by most country music executives to be washed up and incapable of attracting younger fans. Then he hooked up with producer Rick Rubin for a series of recordings featuring covers of artists such as Nine Inch Nails in classic Johnny Cash style. These were a huge success with young Alternative Rock fans, revitalizing Cash's career.
  • In general, Johnny Cash has long been the one exception for people who say they don't like country.
• Green and Purple, a weed-themed parody of Wiz Khalifa's "Black and Yellow", has attracted a lot of /v/ users due to the two colors' memetic status on there, thanks to a NSFW Dragonball porn GIF.
• Hippies and stoners (as well as non-fan Moral Guardians) like to read the song "Puff the Magic Dragon" as a metaphor about getting high, rather than the obvious story about childhood imagination and growing up. The writers of the song have made it very clear that it's not about drugs.
• A lot of fans of rave music have no interest in going to a club, they enjoy it for its energy. Particularly amongst fans of metal, punk, and indie rock. As a result there are a lot of bands who cross over metal and dance music, and their fanbases are similarly entwined. Similarly, The Alternative Dance indie subgenre has also forged ties between Alternative Rock and dance music, going back to the Disco era.
• Rapper Too $hort's music is made up of stories about pimps and hoes. But you would be shocked to know that he has a disturbingly large racially diverse female fan base.
• Latino rap group Cypress Hill has a surprisingly large fanbase with rock audiences who don't normally listen to hip-hop^note This is likely because many (if not most) of their songs are about cannabis, something that's definitely not exclusive to Latinos or rappers. This audience was eventually one of the reasons they experimented with Rap Metal in their later albums.
• Linkin Park is primarily an Alternative Rock band who started out as a Nu Metal outfit, but thanks to their deep appreciation for hip-hop and constant experimentation with rap and electronic beats, a big part of their fanbase were hip-hop fans who didn't particularly care for rock music until they heard a Linkin Park song. Having collaborations with rap icons like Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes, and Rakim earned them a lot of points with the rap crowd. They even got a shout out from Lupe Fiasco on one of his songs, as he's cited their debut album Hybrid Theory as one of his all-time favorite albums.
• Many of Otaku band (or Gaijin-Rock, as they dub themselves) Area 11's fans are just viewers of the Yogscast, due to two of their members, Sparkles* and Alex Parvis, being members of the network and providing music for the main channel, and not necessarily fans of anime, although a few fans have since gone on to become fans of anime as a result of this band. It helps that they are subtle enough with some of their references and the Gratuitous Japanese isn't too OTT.
• Avenged Sevenfold has a surprisingly large female fanbase. Probably because their music, despite its fierce nature, generally averts the Rated M for Manly trope. Opting to, instead, follow the "sensitive tough guy" model of most post-grunge bands.
• Heavy Metal was originally intended to appeal to working-class, male teenagers and young adults — especially if they were heavily disillusioned with life and taking drugs. How ironic, then, that metal eventually developed a huge middle-class and no smaller upper-class fanbase, and became almost as popular with girls as it was with boys.
  • One of the earliest metal bands, Blue Öyster Cult, provides a very good example of how the genre managed to branch out. BOC originally meant to appeal to three specific demographics: intellectuals, hippies, and kids who wanted to shock their parents, overlapping with the Progressive Rock scene. They were very surprised in the mid-1970s to find that their albums were being snapped up by pop-music fans, and adjusted their sound accordingly. By the early '80s, they were practically a New Wave/synthpop band.
  • A huge example is Hair Metal, which was initially marketed towards men like the rest of metal, but as the 80's went on, there were just as many female fans as male, or even more. A good example is the Judas Priest live video Priest...Live!, released to document the tour in support of Turbo, which was a very hair metal sounding album. If you watch it, the crowd shots show just as many women at the concert as there are men, way more than would have been just two years earlier.
  • On the other hand, harder genres like Death Metal, Black Metal and more extreme Thrash Metal (ie. harder than Metallica or Megadeth) have a very large male to female fandom ratio. At least, in the United States.
• Hip-Hop has a strong following among indie rock fans. Hipster tastemakers like Pitchfork and Stereogum feature as much hip-hop and R&B as much as they do indie rock. This may be surprising at first, but it makes sense considering hip-hop's themes of speaking out for what you believe in and rebelling against the more restrictive norms in society.
• Ever since she first started out as a teenager and was primarily famous for "Royals", Lorde has been much more respected by fans of alternative rock than fans of pop music. This is most likely due to her music being a bit more Darker and Edgier than most early-to-mid-2010s pop.
• Thousand Foot Krutch, despite being a Christian Rock group, have a substantial number of non-Christian and atheist fans. It's gotten to the point where every odd comment is "I don't believe in God but this music is awesome, shut up about religion and rock out" on most of their YouTube videos.
• Skillet have amassed a large fanbase throughout their career. What's particularly impressive is that of these fans, many are not Christian, and of the non-Christian fans, many are agnostic or atheist outright. Many fans are Fan Vid editors who find some of Skillet's songs, especially "Monster", to be great for setting their videos to (to the point that the song "Monster" is seen as a cliche choice).
• Classical Music, in particular Romantic-era stuff (think Beethoven and Wagner) enjoys a large following amongst metalheads. While the overlap seems unlikely on the surface, both genres like rich, multilayered sounds, high levels of technical proficiency, and melodrama and bombast that falls only just short of Narm.
  • Moreover, this is also the reason why Symphonic Metal came to be.
• GEazy has noted his large fanbase with women, primarily who like him for reasons besides his music.
• The Vocaloid song "drop pop candy" is extremely popular with the Undertale fandom thanks to the existence of a fan-made version that casts fan-favorite characters Sans and Papyrus as the singers instead of Rin and Luka; this version is more popular than the original version! Fellow Vocaloid song "Echo" has achieved disproportionate popularity among Undertale fans as well due to an alternate version of the song sung by W.D. Gaster instead of GUMI, which in turn was used in a popular fan animation starring Sans and Gaster.
• Synthwave has quite a following among metalheads, both due to general nostalgia for 80s pop culture and for very similar horror and dystopian themes; prominent musicians Perturbator and Gost got started in metal bands before forming.
• Evanescence were initially marketed towards male and female rock fans, but amassed a large following of pop music fans, goth kids and Emo Teens at their peak. It helps that they happened to have a female singer along with a "goth" image, and their biggest hit was "Bring Me to Life", oft name-dropped as a stereotypical "emo" song.
• The work of Tendon Levey, an outsider/avant-pop musician, has been surprisingly well-received by the extreme metal community, with black metal fans, in particular, accounting for a significant portion of his following. Of course this may also have something to do with his influence among certain circles of the occult as well as the nightmarish nature of his backstory.
• A bizarre case of a song having a surprise fandom: "The Last Stand" by Sabaton is fairly popular with a certain type of Christians. This is because the song has a lot of religious imagery and a very inspiring chorus (For the grace, for the might of the Lord!).
• Similarly to Skillet, Red is a Christian rock band that has a huge following amongst non-Christians and more secular Christians.
• Baby Shark by Kpop music group Pinkfong was aimed at toddlers. It has gone viral around the world, leading to such things as the "Baby Shark Dance Challenge" and the "Baby Shark Ab Challenge". The YouTube video in question has surpassed 3.5 billion views.
• While they were primarily marketed towards white rock fans, Talking Heads developed a fairly sizable black following thanks to their appreciation for and influence from funk music, working with members of Parliament-Funkadelic and Brothers Johnson, even crossing over into the R&B charts with the success of Remain in Light and Speaking in Tongues in the early 1980s. The Staple Singers had an R&B hit with a cover of Talking Heads' "Slippery People" in an arrangement nearly identical to the version that appeared in the Talking Heads' concert film, Stop Making Sense, which proved their popularity among black audiences. In fact, their black following was so up-to-par with their white one that Talking Heads may have been just as influential as Michael Jackson and Prince at breaking down the color barriers that the demise of disco had erected among mainstream music listeners. More recently, the band, and by extension frontman David Byrne's solo career, have gained a sizable following among the autistic community after Byrne discovered and revealed he is himself autistic (though self-diagnosed), with many of these fans likely checking out his music due to this.
• Similarly, Elvis Costello has a big following with black audiences, with famous fans including Chris Rock and Barack Obama. This is especially ironic, considering the infamous N-word incident, which hurt his popularity in the US (but apparently only with white audiences (it probably helps that he immediately claimed it was said in a context of (1) being drunk, and (2) saying the most shocking thing he could think of to get out of a frustrating conversation, and (3) he immediately apologized to Ray Charles, the man he insulted, who (4) forgave him and wrote it off as "drunk talk")), as well as the debate over whether or not it was a smart choice to use the N-word in "Oliver's Army".
• Urban radio stations catering to black audiences were some of the first in the US to play New Wave Music and New Romantic acts, especially the more dance-oriented acts like Duran Duran and Culture Club, when white album rock radio shunned and ridiculed the genre. MTV repaid the favor by not playing any black artists until the success of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean". This likely explains the popularity of Talking Heads and Elvis Costello among black audiences mentioned above.
  • Before that, songs by white rock artists that did unexpectedly well on the Billboard R&B chart include "Bennie and the Jets" by Elton John (peaked at #15, and Elton performed on Soul Train because of it), "Fame" by David Bowie (#21) and "Lowdown" by Boz Scaggs (an album track that first broke through on R&B radio, eventually peaking #5 on the R&B chart, alongside its #3 pop peak).
• While the popularity of disco faded around the turn of the decade from the '70s to the '80s, discotheques became the place to hear New Wave Music and Post-Punk in the U.S. when mainstream rock radio, as mentioned earlier, refused to play it until MTV came along, which explains how Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" managed to make the disco charts.
• There are adults who enjoy The Wiggles, mainly parents who prefer it to more obnoxious children's shows or women who find the performers either attractive or see them as good role models for children.
• Brazilian comedy rock band Mamonas Assassinas wound up becoming very popular with children, given their wacky demeanor, colorful costumes, and how minors just loved listening to and repeating the lowbrow, often profane lyrics (some of which they would only fully understand years later how inappropriate they were, between Double Entendres and at times outright sexual and violent (though jokey) content).
• Carly Rae Jepsen was a mainstream pop star best known for "Call Me Maybe", but after her album E•MO•TION became an Acclaimed Flop, most of her fanbase has been made up of indie rock fans who'd usually never listen to pop music.
• Kacey Musgraves's music has never caught on with the older, more conservative core country audience but she's found a home with the younger and more progressive pop and adult alternative audiences. This started in 2013 when she got blacklisted by country radio for her very explicitly pro-LGBT song "Follow Your Arrow" that found its way to more mainstream audiences. Even after her best album Grammy for 2018's Golden Hour (the first win for a country album since Taylor Swift's win for Fearless in 2010), she didn't get back on country radio. Younger people who mostly stream music have an easier time finding her while older people who still listen to the radio can't. She also has a huge LGBT following which is unheard of for a country singer. All that being said, she's certainly not the first woman in the genre to have something similar happen. It happened in the '70s to Loretta Lynn for having a song about the birth control pill and to the Dixie Chicks in 2003 for speaking negatively about then president George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq.
• Your typical indie rock fan and hipster isn't a fan of extreme metal...but plenty of them are fans of Black Metal. This seems surprising on the surface, but considering black metal's willful obscurity, raw production values, and emphasis on authenticity and rebelling against society, it actually makes sense. This has led to some...issues with the wider metal fanbase.
• Fans of Progressive Rock are another major periphery demographic for metal, largely due to several major metal bands dabbling in the genre and progressive metal becoming a genre all its own, along with the classical influences on metal musicians. In the U.S., the two genres were both played on the same FM rock stations, which encouraged the overlap between prog rock and metal fandom. Other prog rock bands, like Rush, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, and Hawkwind with heavier songs have also encouraged the overlap between prog and metal. And then there's the entire Progressive Metal subgenre that combines elements of both.
  • Similar to Johnny Cash above, Pink Floyd and King Crimson have long been exceptions to people that don't like progressive rock. Their darker, less utopian lyrical themes and lack of pretension compared to other bands in the genre helped.
• At home, Babymetal are seen as just another J-Pop group with a weird gimmick. However, in other countries they have attracted a huge following within the Heavy Metal fandom.
• Queen, despite being one of the quintessential bands classified as "dad rock", gained a large following of teens and young adults in The New '10s. Much of their younger fans are also members of Queen's LGBT Fanbase.
• Eminem:
  • Eminem was marketed mostly to (white) young men and boys, but his most passionate fans tended to be teenage girls, despite his reputation for childish edginess and misogyny. In part, this was because his Slim Shady Alter Ego, a woman-killer intended as Comedic Sociopathy and a way of expressing his rage and pain, fit into Gothic Horror tropes that are about exploring female fears about predatory and abusive men. In addition, his videos frequently playing next to teen idol and boy band videos on Total Request Live did a lot to cause teen girl fans to view him as an edgier version of a Pretty Boy idol.
  • Despite being constantly criticized for his frequently homophobic lyrics, Em also has a large LGBT Fanbase. His transgressive, insecure weirdo persona ends up expressing the kind of forced masculinity that many gay men can relate to from hiding themselves before coming out, and his work also contains a lot of Camp content such as channelling over the top masculine and feminine stereotypes to play with gender roles in a way similar to drag. Over the course of his career, his homophobia began to get referenced more in ways that was to satirize Testosterone Poisoning idiocy (such as panicking over if he would be gay if the tip of his penis somehow went into a guy during a football huddle while he was thinking of a woman), and towards the late 00s he was comfortable enough to turn the already depraved Slim Shady character into a Depraved Bisexual and play himself coming out as gay in The Interview. He's continually said that he has no problem with gay or trans people in real life, campaigned for equal marriage and is best friends with gay icon Elton John, who he's duetted with numerous times and who helped mentor him out of his pill addiction. One of the few times he's ever apologized for his lyrics was for using a homophobic slur towards Tyler, the Creator, who at the time had fan speculation that he was gay due to anecdotes on his Flower Boy album. Eminem claimed he meant it in good fun but didn't want to 'hurt a whole community'.
  • At the beginning of his career, Eminem's childlike appearance and mannerisms, high-pitched delivery, Subverted Kids' Show aesthetic, childish lyrical topics like superheroes, school bully revenge fantasies and Potty Humor, and use of nursery rhyme-inspired melodies and Zany Cartoon imagery led to him getting a significant fandom amongst young children. Whether this is intentional and evil, unintentional but dangerous, or not really a big deal whether or not it was meant this way was a subject of fearsome debate. Eminem frequently acknowledged his child fanbase in his lyrics, generally with claims that his violent and defiant lyrics can inspire kids with no power in their lives, and recorded a substantially altered Clean version of Encore (his most childish album). After Eminem's return from his overdose with a more mature image and sound (and not being promoted amongst Teen Pop acts on TRL as much), this element to his appeal was dropped.
• Britney Spears is a Christian girl from the Deep South (born in Mississippi, raised in Louisiana) who has a huge following among gay men. It helps that she primarily performs uptempo dance-pop music, and she partly owes her Career Resurrection to the LGBTQ+ community.
• Beyoncé was originally marketed to African-American females, both as part of Destiny's Child and as a solo singer. However, half of her fandom, the Beyhive, is comprised of white men & women, including a good portion of gay men and a number of indie rock fans.
• Lady Gaga:
  • At first, Lady Gaga was initially marketed to clubgoers and gay men, with her electropop music being more fit for clubs than for mainstream radio. However, in her heyday, she gained a large following of young girls, who viewed her as a idol in a similar way to how young girls in the 80s saw Madonna or Cyndi Lauper. Her large following of young girls caused many people outside her target demographic and fanbase to view her as a much more flamboyant version of a "diva"-type idol.
  • Gaga has proven to be quite popular with middle-aged women and mothers, no doubt due to her heavy Madonna influence, as well as her diva stage persona.
• Korn, Slipknot, System of a Down, and Linkin Park are the usual exceptions to people that don't like nu metal. The fact that Korn were the genre's Trope Maker, that Slipknot are one of the genre's most recognizable acts, that System Of A Down leans a bit to conventional metal genres and that Linkin Park's status was elevated after Chester Bennington's death helps.
• Alter Bridge were originally marketed towards teenagers, much like the band they were spawned from, Creed. However, their biggest audience is among older classic rock fans, who've noticed the heavy influence from 70s rock bands. In addition, Alter Bridge won over many of Creed's detractors, mainly because of the difference in vocal style between Myles Kennedy and Scott Stapp, as well as the more classic rock-influenced sound.
• Detroit garage rock band Electric Six have a cult following among Hair Metal fans, mostly thanks to the band's sound incorporating elements of the genre.
• Entombed are ridiculously popular with punk fans, especially American Hardcore Punk and metallic hardcore fans to the point a style of metallic hardcore heavily influenced by them is usually called Entombedcore.
• Despite the perception that K-Pop male idol groups are geared toward the female audience, Big Bang actually has a huge male fanbase. This is due to the cool, manly, and unique style that the members emulate and many considered them to be their role models.
• Oliver Tree's music is more appropriate for teens and young adults, but he has a large following of young children, probably due to his quirky outfits and funny antics. He is also very popular on TikTok, which is what Oliver himself tends to blame it on. He was even nominated for a Kids' Choice Award in 2022. As much as he jokes about it on social media and at his shows, he actually embraces his young audience.
• A lot of country music fans also listen to heavy metal music and many metalheads also listen to country music.
  • Ditto for the Hardcore Punk and Heavy Metal (specifically Thrash Metal) fans.
• Long before it became common for pop singers to get followings in the indie scene, Justin Timberlake and especially his breakthrough solo album FutureSex/LoveSounds was extremely popular among hipsters who would normally never listen to pop or R&B. 4chan's music board /mu/, which is stereotypically the most hipster-y place on the internet, even included it on their Essential Albums list.
• Paramore's substantial fanbase within the African-American community has been noted by many writers, especially given that Pop Punk in the 2000s was seen as a very White genre among both its fans and its musicians. In the late 2010s and early '20s, many Black musicians like Lil Uzi Vert, Rico Nasty, and Princess Nokia cited Paramore as a direct influence on their style. A commonly-cited explanation is that the band's members were both clean-cut Christians from the South who didn't use "hard" swear words in their songs (their frontwoman Hayley Williams was a church choir girl and part of a short-lived Christian pop group called Mammoth City Messengers) and also politically and culturally progressive, meaning that their music wasn't offensive from either an obscenity standpoint or a political/racial one and thus passed muster with the parents of many Black kids (who'd be on the lookout not only for sex and cursing but also for racism) in ways that many other White rock bands didn't. From there, Paramore's emo-flavored lyrics about not fitting in resonated with many Black youth, especially those who had been raised in close proximity to White culture. Williams is fully aware of her Black fandom, and discussed it in an interview with Sequoia Holmes, the host of a podcast called — fittingly enough — Black People Love Paramore that's about this trope more broadly within the Black community.

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