Home Previous Entry
And the biggest-selling U.S. album of last 20 years is...Kim Hughes Jan 5, 2012 0 Comments
Clearly, it will take more than a spectacularly awful collaboration with rock codger Lou Reed to topple the towering behemoth that is Metallica. It’s now been officially confirmed that the Bay Area band's so-called Black Album [[actually self-titled) from 1991 is the biggest seller in America over the past 20 years.
Since its release, according to sales monitoring system Soundscan, the disc has shifted a staggering 15,735,000 copies in the U.S. alone. Indeed, as Classic Rock notes, in total, the band has sold 53,170,000 copies of all their albums since 91, making them the fourth biggest artist of the Soundscan era, behind Garth Brooks, The Beatles and Mariah Carey [[while demonstrating the at-once curiously eclectic and yet wholly mainstream tastes of the broader American record-buying public).
Metallica will, of course, be playing the whole of The Black Album when they headline England’s Download Festival next June and who knows… maybe another full-scale world tour of the disc might be in the offing. Presumably, the four members of the band and their handlers are big fans of the mountains of cash the Metallica machine generates at full-tilt.
As we reported yesterday, the group will release a four-song EP, Beyond Magnetic, later this month, featuring live versions of four songs written for 2008’s Death Magnetic disc but left off the finished album.
Bookmarks