Remember, last week how we said Metallica's 25-year-old Black Album has been pushing about 5,000 units a week lately? Well, this week, they topped that average by over 1,000 units, pushing a total of 6,300 units this week, for a total of 16.3 million units overall.
But even more interesting, is that the 25-year-old album has outsold Megadeth's new album released six weeks ago, Dystopia. Megadeth's album sold 4,800 this week. This is actually the second week in a row this happened as last week, Metallica pushed 6,400 units to Megadeth's 5,300.
A similar scenario happened four years ago, when Megadeth released their critically-panned album, Super Collider. The difference is it took over eight weeks for Megadeth sales to lower to a point below Metallica's, back when the Black Album was only pushing 1,800 units a week (also this was likely before streaming was taken into account with these numbers.)
The positive story here is that both albums are selling very well, Megadeth is already outpacing their last album for sales. But ultimately, this proves, yet again, that the Black Album is an unstoppable beast!
In other positive Big Four album sale news, Anthrax came in at #9 on the Billboard charts, their highest chart position in 20 years with the release of For All Kings. The album sold 33,500 units, which is a great number for the band.
[h/t Ryan Downey]
