Album Sales a Trivial Fraction of Metallica’s Revenue

metallica

Via Techdirt, David Levine spots an interesting breakdown of Metallica’s revenues:

Along with touring revenue — the band pulled in $22.8 million from 55 arena shows reported to Boxscore that drew more than 968,000 fans — Metallica sold 694,000 albums in 2009. The majority of those sales came from its Rick Rubin-produced 2008 release, “Death Magnetic” (297,000). Album sales revenue totaled $1.6 million. And most of Metallica’s track download earnings came from its 1991 hit “Enter Sandman,” which sold 450,000.

This underscores a point I made last month: For many bands, album sales are already a trivial fraction of their revenues. A world in which bands give away music to sell more concert tickets and merchandise would be terrible for record labels, but it wouldn’t be a big change for a lot of bands. And this model is especially attractive for up-and-coming musicians who have the most to gain from using free music as a promotional vehicle.

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4 Responses to Album Sales a Trivial Fraction of Metallica’s Revenue

  1. Anonymous says:

    yes take the corparate crap out of music

  2. Anonymous says:

    lahe pilt.

  3. Dan Thomson says:

    This is a sign of the times, this shows that playing live is what matter and that people will go to a show just because of a name.

    I was playing metal with my band Fuse Breaker on 08 25 2012 in Vancouver, and everyone went to the3 show. I have lived Metallica since 1984, however the concensus was that the stage and show was great, but the music was so so.

    Are they just doing shows for the sake of a contract.

    Long live metal

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