With Metallica's black album set to crack 16 million US sales soon, a new report by Billboard today confirms that the band is the third highest selling act of the Soundscan era.
Soundscan is the methodology that started in 1991 by Nielsen to report the numbers to Billboard, who reports bands' weekly chart placement. We've been tweeting every week how the black album constantly pushes out ~2,000 copies a week and cumulatively the group has sold 54.26 million copies of their albums since 1991, behind only Garth Brooks (69.52m) and The Beatles (65.55m). I'm sure if the rating system started even 10 years before, the Beatles would easily be number 1.
What's funny is in 2012, Kirk Hammett was lamenting about how bands can't make money off record sales anymore:
“The cycles of taking two years off don’t exist anymore. We were able to do that because we had record royalties coming in consistently. Now you put out an album, and you have a windfall maybe once or twice but not the way it used to be — a check every three months.”
I think you guys will be just fine!
