Poll: Who the Hell Just Bought Metallica’s Black Album Last Week?
Earlier today, I had the following Twitter exchange with our friends over at Metal Injection:
@metalinjection In related news, 2,102 40-somethings couldn’t find their copy of The Black Album last week.
— Axl Rosenberg (@axl_rosenberg) January 15, 2014
Thing is, I’m only half-kidding. 40-something isn’t even that old; some of my best friends are 40-something!
I just can’t figure out who the fuck else would buy The Black Album in 2014.
Ten or twelve years ago, I would have said, “Oh, it’s kids just now getting into Metallica because of their big brother or older cousin or debilitating lack of a high school sex life”… but young people don’t buy music anymore, right? That’s what the industry keeps telling us, isn’t it? So the BEST case scenario today would be that fourteen-year-old just discovering Metallica listens to their music via a legal streaming service like Spotify or Google Play. But those 2,102 albums, regardless of whether they were physical or digital, they were all legal purchases. So it couldn’t have been the younger crowd.
But why would anyone older just be buying The Black Album NOW? Given how often “Enter Sandman” is played at sporting events alone, I find it hard to believe that anyone over the age of thirty just heard the song for the first time and went home and bought the album.
I do, however, find it plausible that 2,102 people heard “Enter Sandman” or “Sad But True” or whatever last week, went “Oh yeah, I used to love this album!”, realized they had no fucking idea where they put their copy, and took to either Amazon or iTunes to re-purchase it.
What do you guys and gals think? Were these two-thousand buys courtesy of young ‘uns just discovering metal now? Or is it older people reuniting with an old friend? Vote below:
