I seek a diverse spectrum of roles. If I just was in a large-budget feature for a younger audience, then I want to find a smaller, more character-driven piece that might be for a more mature audience. Or if I'm playing a goofier character, then maybe I want to go play a serious, psychopathic character. But at the same time, it's usually a case-by-case basis where I'm judging the merit of a role by the script I'm given, and it usually has less to do with the larger framework and more to do with how the part personally appeals to me in that moment.
When we were doing shows in the mid-'90s, the audiences were 95% black. What's happened now is the gentrification of hip-hop. A lot of cities passed ordinances that made it hard for black audiences to gather in large groups. Clubs are more open to hip-hop now 'cause it's the same crowd that goes to rock shows.
I've grown up with my audience; they're my age or older. Not a lot of kids are coming to see me.
And there's a lot of that stuff with people bringing their kids, kids bringing their parents, people bringing their grandparents - I mean, it's gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographics of our audience.
I'm reaching a huge audience. I'm doing what artists like Beyonce are doing in terms of selling out stadiums. The difference is my audience speaks Spanish.
What I love about my audience is it's extremely diverse as far as the ethnicities and the ages that show up.
People do still cheer for the President. And some of the military audiences are more likely to cheer than others. I have seen him speak lately in front of groups like Freedom House, where the applause was a long time coming.
MTV refers to its audience as 'the demo.' Being 'in the demo' means being in the demographic sweet spot that advertisers want their programming to hit, which is ideally between 18 and 24.
I mean, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, I think the young kids sell lot of records. But for an older kind of artist, more of a sort of heritage, vintage type of artist, you have to think outside the box.
You look around our audiences, and you see the spectrum - old fans and young people.
Why do we have 'Transformers 5 or 6?' Because young kids will go and see it four or five times.
When you do music, you have no control who comes to your shows.
I'm not making music for old people or young people.
I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.
I don't mind having 16-year-old fans, but I hate just having 16-year-old fans. I want more diversity.
I am continually pleasantly surprised by how many people are showing up at shows and are younger than our first record.
I don't think the demographic for skating really entails a lot of basketball watching.
I don't pay attention to target audiences and therefore I often hear that I am a ratings killer, somebody who fundamentally doesn't care whether one person is watching or an entire soccer stadium.
D.C. is one my largest audiences. They buy tons of records of mine in Washington, D.C.
It seems like every ten years there's a book that says that poetry used to be popular, and now it's not, but we really have no way of knowing, in terms of relative size of audience and other things, exactly who readers were.
The whole notion that I don't appeal to the demographic - all my fans are young men. Someone asked me the other day, "So are your shows just full of 40-year-old single women?" I'm like, "I would be rich if that were true."
The Runaways' audience was 90 percent male. That was kind of depressing...Why don't women-our own gender-come out and support us?
I don't know, I think the crowds are even more responsive now because the audiences are skewing younger.
Around 2009, my audience started getting a lot more mainstream - younger people, R&B and hip-hop fans mixed in with the jazz audience.
I think everybody in news understands that the audience that watches for more than an hour is not your target audience - because those people are on life support.
