FTR I quite like Tool, but they tend to attract a lot of fans who are, well, tools.
Tool and Sublime and - I’ll admit it - Dave, are on a completely different artistic level than Fred Durst.
Pretty much every Sublime fan I’ve met has been a stoner dirtbag or another in a long line of faceless, generic undergrads.
But I’ve gotta be honest with you guys: I’m a Michael Bolton fan. For my money, I don’t know if it gets any better than when he sings “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
That, and also, while all those people claimed that Sublime was the greatest thing ever, 95% of them couldn’t name you a track off of “40 oz. to Freedom” except for the title track, Smoked Two Joints, or Date Rape.
Now granted, I can’t name any off the top of my head either, but I never claimed to be a fan.
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing, except to me that just says they’re not really fans. The real test is if you know Greasy Lesbian Hamburger Fight and Pass Me the Laserbeam :).
Yeah, I’m a DMB fan. Have been for a long time. And I’m about as far from the stereotypical fan as it’s possible to be. I know who those fans are, though, and I merely tolerate them at concerts. However, I didn’t realize that drunk college kids in frat clothes were unique to DMB concerts. Guess I have to get out more. If the hate is on the fans instead of the music, well then, I’m fucked. If the hate is on the music, we’ll just have to settle on difference of opinion.
I’m not cool – never was and never hope to be. (There are bands called Sublime and Coldplay???) And I’ve yet to try to persuade someone to enjoy what I love. I am mainly posting not to defend Dave Matthews Band, but to support those few who posted earlier who, like me, find meaning or joy in their music. I’m sure they will agree that anything live is better than anything studio; that what you hear on FRANK FM pales in comparison to a live Two Step or Pig or Lie in Our Graves or Warehouse.
And to inform my few fellow non-cool DMB fan Dopers that I have front and center tickets to the first Fenway concert at the end of May. 
I say this as someone who likes both bands, if you’re gonna kill DMB for their stereotypical fans, than pot meet kettle wrt Sublime. I don’t think I met a single highsschool or college burnout in the 97 to 03 time period who didn’t think Sublime was God’s gift to music.
I swear I did not know a “stereotypical” Sublime fan existed. I’ve met, IIRC, one other guy besides myself who was deeply into their music, and he was a factory worker almost 30 years old back in 1998.
From my direct experience that’s true for commercial radio, but not for commercially successful artists, which is really a stick in my craw whenever anyone claims that commercial stations are so smart that they cater to whatever’s popular: no, sometimes they just play the same old thing/focus industry crap because of their conservative nature of “hey, it worked for the last 10 years, it should still work.”
For a couple years around 2001-2003 I was part of a focus group that listened to songs and rated them on their repetitiveness and quality. I thought it would be exciting since I, naive at the time, thought that the rock stations would be getting more into emo because it was hugely popular, but they never played any emo samples for me to vote on. Not a single one by any definition of the genre. So of COURSE if the only thing I could even VOTE on was the standard crap they are being paid to play by the industry, then their results of what the station should play will be a subset of that.
But if they did play emo they would have probably gotten better ratings. And ratings are the be all end all. So in the end it was commercial radio being stupid (and getting kickbacks), not some sort of maniacal genius.