The first week sales for Metallica's new album 72 Seasons are pretty interesting.
The good news is that 72 Seasons landed at the No. 2 spot on the Billboard 200 chart with 146,000 equivalent album units earned. According to Billboard, this breaks down to 134,000 album sales, 11,500 streaming equivalent albums (SEA), and 500 track equivalent albums (TEA). Each SEA or TEA equals one digital album sale, or 10 individual digital tracks sold from an album, or either 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand streams generated by songs from an album.
72 Seasons is the biggest rock album to hit the Billboard charts since Tool released Fear Inoculum in 2019, and achieved 270,000 equivalent album units. So yes – Tool's massive comeback was noticeably more popular than Metallica's first new album in seven years. Still, it proves that the big names have some staying power on the charts.
The more interesting news is that it's Metallica's least popular album in the Nielsen Soundscan age. For starters, Metallica's 2016 album Hardwired… to Self-Destruct is the only other Metallica album to be tracked with album-equivalent units (the practice started in 2014 to include streaming number). Hardwired… to Self-Destruct sold 291,000 album-equivalent units in its first week. Outside that, Metallica's discography going back to 1991 when Nielsen Soundscan started runs as follows:
- Death Magnetic sold 490,000
- St. Anger sold 417,000
- Reload sold 436,000
- Load sold 680,000
- The Black Album/Metallica sold 598,000
72 Seasons is also the first Metallica record not to debut at No. 1 since …And Justice For All in 1988.
Keep in mind this isn't a dig at 72 Seasons – I personally have gone on record to talk about how much I like it. It's just a little crazy to see a brand new Metallica album come in with markedly less sales than its predecessors. For reference, country artist Morgan Wallen's 2023 album One Thing At A Time is currently on its seventh consecutive and total week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart with 166,000 equivalent album units.
What this means in the overall scheme of things is a mystery. Is rock overall on a decline with the general population? Sure, Tool did some insane numbers, but they seem to be an outlier at the moment. Or is that folks just didn't show up for the new Metallica record as they have in the past? Obviously physical sales don't cut it like they used to, but someone like Wallen is raking in 151,000 SEAs in a week – so millions upon millions of streams – and staying at No. 1. So it's possible to do it based mostly on streaming.
