When Metallica released Hardwired… To Self-Destruct on November 2016, the album went straight to #1 on the Billboard 200 with 291,000 albums sold. It has since surpassed one million copies sold AND was the highest selling hard rock/heavy metal album of 2017.
That number is both conventional albums sold and streaming equivalents, but no matter which way you slice it, that's still really impressive. Then when Metallica went on their extensive North American tour in 2017, tickets came with a copy of the album, which sent it back to #5 on the charts. Now in 2018, they've done it again.
Metallica recently announced a massive 2018 and 2019 North American tour that'll run from September 2018 to March 2019, and as usual, tickets come with a copy of the album.
Those ticket sales have translated into 63,000 album sales, and Hardwired… To Self-Destruct is back at #2 on the Billboard 200. Virtually the exact same thing happened in March, 2017 when the band put tickets on sale for its first leg of the tour.
At this rate, all Metallica really has to do is keep announcing tours and ticket packages like this, and the album is just going to keep charting every single year… that is, until they come out with a new one.
