Friendly Fandoms / Music

• Although one band (The Hollies) can be considered the shiniest of 60s sunshiny pop and the other (Procol Harum) can be considered, er, something else, both bands and the their respective fandoms adore each other. No joke, the number of times that members of their band have helped out the others is legion. The friendship extends very much to the fans, and many times a Hollies fan is a Procol Harum fan and vice-versa. It helps that when Procol Harum had a date on Top Of The Pops in their earlier incarnation as The Paramounts, but had recently had all their gear nicked - guess who lent them theirs? And that the respective drummers, of said bands, Bobby Elliott and B.J. Wilson quickly became BFFs until Wilson's untimely death in 1990.
• Most jazz and classical music fans and players will like each other and go to each other's concerts. Classical fans also tend to like film scores, as they're usually done in a classical style.
• Metal bands which don't have a rivalry usually have some overlap.
  • This is subverted by Metallica and Megadeth, whose fandoms have rivalries but have tons of shared fans who appreciate both bands. Both fanbases appreciate Mustaine's recordings with Metallica such as "No Life Till Leather", and in fact, the latter is how a lot of Metallica fans got into Megadeth.
• Gospel drummers and extreme metal drummers are often friendly and will look to each other for guidance; gospel drummers often look to extreme metal drummers for guidance on fluidity, stamina, and consistency at high tempos, while extreme metal drummers often look to gospel drummers for guidance on groove and syncopation, fill ideas and accents, and stick control.
• Kagerou Project and Evillious Chronicles fandoms, to the point that most fans are fans of the other one involved. Mainly due to that both are epic Rock Opera franchises (Evillious more than Kagerou Project) and use Vocaloid to create Awesome Music. In Tumblr, Kagerou Project also shares many fans with other Vocaloid song series that have original characters, such as Shuuen no Shiori Project and Mikagura School Suite.
• Yuki Kajiura and Yoko Kanno have both this and Fandom Rivalry, depending upon the specific persons talking.
• Fans of the Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age seem to get along well, since their front-men are involved in several projects together (Dave Grohl has even guested on a few QotSA albums) along with being poster-boys for modern alternative rockers' habit of having too many damn side-projects.
  • Fans of Red Hot Chili Peppers like Foo Fighters because the bands are longtime friends. They toured together in 1999 and did some MTV specials together. RHCP fans who are fans of Dave Navarro's time in the band tend to like Jane's Addiction too, especially as Flea was briefly in the band.
• Fans of Amy Winehouse either overlap with due to their similar styles, or are friendly with fans of Adele, Lady Gaga and Paloma Faith as the latter three have all regularly cited Amy as an influence. (The fact that they all did so when Amy was alive is especially appreciated by some of her fans, as it helped to counteract the negative press Amy was receiving at the time.)
• Fans of Queens of the Stone Age and Nine Inch Nails are also quite friendly; it helps that the two bands have toured together, and performed together at the 2014 Grammys (with Dave Grohl and Lindsey Buckingham, to boot).
• Nightwish and Sonata Arctica share a lot of fans, probably because the bands have toured together and the members are friends.
• Mr. B The Gentleman Rhymer and Professor Elemental have both this and Fandom Rivalry, depending upon the persons talking.
• The fandoms of Tori Amos, Björk, and PJ Harvey have a lot of people in common. It's probably because they all started their solo careers during the early '90s and were in an interview together.
• Otep, Amanda Palmer, and Emilie Autumn. They're apparently all friends IRL. Also, to some extent, Courtney Love and Emilie Autumn (because Emilie was in Courtney's backing band), but that sometimes turns into Fandom Rivalry instead.
• Tupac Shakur fans and The Notorious B.I.G. fans used to not get along. Then, 1997 came around with both rappers having been murdered, and the two fandoms are now far more amicable on account of Dead Artists Are Better taking effect.
• Enter Shikari fans and Hadouken! fans. We don't know the exact reason, but it's nice to be friends, right?
• Also The Qemists and Enter Shikari, due to the latter being featured and remixing many of the former's songs.
• Thanks to many world tours and live concerts made together, together with similar sounding music, Goldfrapp and Ladytron have a severe fandom overlap. Ladytron named themselves after a song by Roxy Music. Brian Eno, a former member of Roxy Music, is a fan of them. So, yeah, Ladytron's fandom is also in good terms with the ones of Roxy Music and of Brian Eno.
• Melodic Death Metal bands Insomnium and Omnium Gatherum have very strong ties with each other, to the point where they both share a huge portion of their respective fan bases and the two bands are collectively known as Insomnium Gatherum. They also share a guitarist (Markus Vanhala) which has only served to increase their collective fanbase.
• Pink Floyd fans tend to like Kate Bush because Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour discovered her and has appeared on several of her albums.
• Dan Bull fans tend to get along well with fans of InTheLittleWood and to a lesser extent the Yogscast, due to Dan recording tracks with both of them and getting along especially well with the former. Similarly, his fandom has developed a growing relationship with Epic Rap Battles of History fans, in part due to Dan's terrifying depiction of Jack the Ripper.
• Iced Earth and Blind Guardian fans have coexisted since the bands toured Germany together in the early 90s and became fast friends. When Jon Schaffer (of Iced Earth) and Hansi Kursch (of Blind Guardian) formed their side project Demons And Wizards and released two albums, which solidified the connection in the eyes of fans.
• Lana Del Rey fans are often also fans of Marina Diamandis. The artists themselves like each other's work and their shared love of satirical lyrics wins over many fans.
• The Within Temptation and Tarja Turunen fandoms have been united by marriage ever since the release of "Paradise (What About Us)," a duet between Sharon Den Adel and Tarja, with a music video that pushed the Homoerotic Subtext through the roof. The Sharja ship promptly took off, with the corresponding merger of the fans.
• Hudson Mohawke and Rustie fans get along quite swimmingly, possibly thanks to both being Scottish hip hop/trap producers that usually enter Genre-Busting territory, and are subscribed to the same label - Warp Records^note of Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Brian Eno fame. It also helps the fact that they both appeared in a handful of games such as Sleeping Dogs (2012) and Watch_Dogs 2^note Of which Hudson Mohawke composed the original score..
• In quite possibly one of the weirdest friendly fandoms, Synthwave and Heavy Metal have a pretty close and friendly fandom to one another. This also goes into many synthwave musicians that have backgrounds in metal and thus implemented it in their sound, such as Perturbator, Master Boot Record, Dance with the Dead, Scandroid, Hexenkraft, and others, while many Retraux metal bands added synthwave elements in ther music.
  • Which is probably the reason synth-metal exists.
• Billy Bragg and Kirsty Mac Coll's fandoms overlap a lot. Not surprising since Bragg and MacColl were themselves friends and recurring collaborators, and MacColl's cover of Bragg's "A New England" is a common gateway into both fandoms.
• Fans of one Progressive Rock band, such as Pink Floyd, Yes, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Porcupine Tree, Rush, Genesis, etc., tend to be fans of other major bands in the genre. There's also quite a bit of overlap between the prog rock and metal fandoms, largely due to several major metal bands, including Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Queen (all of whom are listed as "prog related" on the website Prog Archives) dabbling in the genre, along with the classical influences on metal musicians, as well as King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, and Rush heaving a heavier take on prog in turn. In the U.S., the two genres were both played on the same FM rock stations, which further encouraged the overlap between prog rock and metal fandom. And then there's the entire Progressive Metal subgenre that combines elements of both. Pink Floyd seems to be the primary exception to people that don't like progressive rock. The band's lyrical themes and lack of pretension seem to help.
  • Fans of Porcupine Tree and Opeth are very good friends as the bands' frontmen (Steven Wilson and Mikael Åkerfeldt, respectively) have collaborated on many occasions and have inspired each other's songwriting.
  • Fans of Genesis and Camel get along well as both bands are overall progressive but also crafted a variety of accessible albums and songs for newcomers throughout their career (for example, Genesis's "Duke" album and Camel's "Breathless" album). Although Genesis is clearly the more successful of the two, both have albums that fully match the prog label and albums that mix prog with soft rock, pop rock, art rock and instrumental music, and both bands accomplished this by slowly evolving their sound as years passed.
• Rammstein fans and Marilyn Manson fans have a great deal of overlap due to them being dark Industrial Metal bands with a penchant for creating controversy with their lyrical subject matter and imagery. It helps that Manson is friends with the band.
• BABYMETAL fans share a noticeable overlap with fans of Judas Priest and Rob Zombie thanks in part to the two's interactions with the band^note  Rob Halford joining the girls for covers of two of Priest's Signature Songs and Zombie defending the band from metal gatekeepers bashing the girls online and praising them as one of the most energetic and engaging metal acts in years. and for the energetic and theatrical live shows they perform.
• Fans of country music stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood are frequently one and the same, unsurprisingly so since the two have been regular collaborators and duet partners since the beginning of their careers and frequently toured together. To the glee of many of their fans, who had suspected mutual UST for years, they began dating around 2000 and married in 2005. Ever since, Trisha almost always does a brief set in the middle of Garth's concerts, usually including "She's In Love With The Boy", "Walkaway Joe", and "How Do I Live", three of her biggest hits. Go ahead, count how many of the fans in the audience know every single word. (It's most of them.)^note Interestingly, Garth said upon meeting Trisha that he'd felt like he had just met his wife — which was awkward since he'd already been married to his first wife for 13 months at the time. He and Sandy divorced in 2000, a year after Trisha divorced her second husband, Bobby Reynolds of The Mavericks. According to both, they're the loves of each other's lives.
• A really odd case of this was forged between the fanbases of experimental Hip-Hop trio Death Grips and lighthearted Indie Pop trio Kero Kero Bonito. Both projects are wildly different in tone — Death Grips is known for being challenging, aggressive, and abrasive, while KKB is known for being cute, down-to-earth, and generally upbeat — and yet they've found similar overlap, partly because they've broadly found success through meme culture, with each having developed unique cult status among the internet, and partly because they are so diametrically-opposing. It also helps that in their own ways, both groups and their audiences have a sense of humor regarding their popularity — case in point, KKB's live cover of Death Grips' "I've Seen Footage" provoked wildly enthusiastic Audience Participation.
• Halestorm and Lovebites, since Lovebites' name is a Shout-Out to a Halestorm song. Lovebites opened for Halestorm on their 2019 tour of Japan.
• Taylor Swift fans tend to get on with (and overlap with) fans of Olivia Rodrigo, since Rodrigo is a big fan of Swift's, citing her as one of her biggest inspirations and saying she'd love to write or record a song together. Swift, in turn, has shown Rodrigo a lot of support, sending her a personal letter of congratulations when she had her first hit, and letting her sample one of her songs for her debut album. Both women are singer-songwriters with intimate, narrative lyrics inspired from their own lives, who dabble in many different genres, so you can see why fans of one would like the other, and there's in general a mutual respect between the fandoms as well as the artists.
• Fans of Good Kid and Lovejoy tend to get along, due to their similar music styles. The band members are friends with each other, and even did a collaboration tour in October 2022.
• 2000s British girl groups Sugababes and Girls Aloud share a lot of the same fans, they even did a song together and a lot of their songs are written by the same songwriting team, Xenomania.
• The fans of Pantera and Christina Grimmie formed this, as both Grimmie and Dimebag died in an almost exact same way, their fandoms express condolences to each other and are united in preventing artists being killed by obsessive fans. Pantera's official account on Facebook criticising the venues for not preventing Grimmie's murder only accelerated the bond between two fandoms.
• Due to the frankly incestuous nature of European symphonic / progressive metal bands, fans of any one band tend to become fans of a number of other bands as well. Popular gateway bands are Nightwish, Kamelot, Epica and Within Temptation. The discovery of new (and more obscure) bands tends to speed up once the average fan discovers that members of their favorite bands collaborated with Arjen Anthony Lucassen on Ayreon or his other projects.

---