Warner Bros. 508732
Producer: Rick Rubin
Track listing: That Was Just Your Life / The End of the Line / Brocken, Beat & Scarred / The Day That Never Comes / All Nightmare Long / Cyanide / The Unforgiven III / The Judas Kiss / Suicide & Redemption / My Apocalypse
September 27, 2008
3 weeks
It takes a mix of chutzpah and business savvy for an act to break from the norm of releasing an album on traditional Tuesday street date. Metallica is an act that has both.
In order to have a simultaneous international release date, the band opted to release Death Magnetic on a Friday, seemingly unconcerned that the short sales week would hurt its chances at debuting in the top spot. Metallica is an act that has both.
In order to have a simultaneous international release date, the band opted to release Death Magnetic on a Friday, seemingly unconcerned that the short sales week would hurt its chances at debuting in the top spot. Metallica’s strategy paid of in spades in the U.S. In a mere three-day window, Death Magnetic racked up sales of 490,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, besting its last proper album and chart-topper, 2003’s St. Anger, which sold 418,000, in a similarly abbreviated sales week. More importantly, it made Metallica the first band to have five albums debut at Number 1, topping the Beatles, U2 and the Dave Matthews Band, who all have four Number 1 debuts.
Part of the reason the band chose to go with a worldwide release date was to cut down on the possibility of illegal pre-release file-sharing. In 2000, Metallica filed a suit against then-illegal file-sharing network Napster, which led to a backlash against the band. Although Metallica had hoped its troubles with leaks on the Internet were behind them, it reared its ugly head again as Death Magnetic hit the streets. An enterprising young audio engineer named Hench Bummertone re-edited the album, retitled it Death Magnetic: Better, Shorted and Cut, and posted it on file-sharing torrent sites. “I wanted a new album by Metallica that I could listen to without getting irritated by some lame lyrics or ploddy riffs that go nowhere for three minutes before turning into something cool,” he wrote in a email to the Metal Sucks website. In a review of the album for the Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan, Jonn Jeppsson admitted that he had downloaded the unofficial edited version of the album from The Pirate Bay, and that he preferred it to the original. That didn’t go over well with Universal Music, which distributes the album outside the U.S. The record company promptly canceled Jeppsson’s scheduled interview with Metallica, although Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, burned by the Napster backlash, seemingly had come to terms with the reality that illegal file-sharing is nearly impossible to stop. “If this thing leaks all over the world today or tomorrow, happy days,” he said on San Francisco radio station Live 105. “It’s 2008 and it’s part of how it is these days.”
File-sharing or not, Death Magnetic appeared to be both a critical and commercial hit upon its release, and was generally hailed as a return to form following the commercial and critical disappointment of St. Anger. Even re-editor Bummertone noted, “The original version of Death Magnetic is the best thing that they’ve done since …And Justice for All.“
For Death Magnetic, Metallica split from longtime producer Bob Rock, who helped the band work through its various crises in the 2004 rockumentary Some Kind of Monster. (The live EP of the same name, released in conjunction with the film, peaked at number 37 in 2004). In replacing Rock, Metallica turned to ace producer Rick Rubin, who encouraged the band to look back at its early days. “Rick said he wanted to make the definitive Metallica record,” Ulrich told Rolling Stone‘s David Fricke, “a step forward that incorporated elements from what he considered our creative peak. Every time there was a fork in the road, we said, ‘In 1985, we would have done this.” That strategy worked for Metallica on Death Magnetic.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of September 27, 2008
1. Death Magnetic, Metallica
2. The Recession, Young Jeezy
3. Rock N Roll Jesus, Kid Rock
4. Do You Know, Jessica Simpson
5. All Hope is Gone, Slipknot