AVENGED SEVENFOLD Singer Says 60% Of METALLICA's Audience On Stadium Tour Were 'Casual Fans' Who Only Owned 'Black' Album

AVENGED SEVENFOLD's M. Shadows says that the majority of the people who came to see METALLICA during the two bands' joint summer 2017 stadium tour are "casual fans" who only have a copy of the San Francisco heavy metal legends' multi-platinum 1991 album.

METALLICA's first North American trek in eight years, which was seen by hundreds of thousands people, was also the band's first stadium run in almost two decades. It kicked off in May in Baltimore at M&T Bank Stadium.

During an October 19 event at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, Shadows and his bandmates spoke about the experience of supporting METALLICA on this year's tour. The singer said: "What you learn is that all the complaining and all the [negativity] online, or in this world, when you actually go to a stadium show, to sell out stadiums, it's required that you have The Black Album. You can play deep cuts all you want — you can play 'Master Of Puppets', this and that, but when they're playing The Black Album songs, every single person there is going crazy. And it's like sixty percent of their audience are casual fans that only have The Black Album, and that's one thing that's never gets reflected by their hardcore fans."

He continued: "To go do stadiums, you have to have a record that's worked at radio, or crossed over at some point into the consciousness of the human collective, and they had that with The Black Album. As much as we heard this and that, people complaining that they want deeper cuts from them — which I get — but when they play The Black Album, they play 'Sad But True', 'Enter Sandman', 'Unforgiven', it's just a different vibe, and you can tell that a lot of their audience are casual fans, which is something they've done and nurtured really well throughout their career.

"A lot of the metal bands that were around when METALLICA put out The Black Album, now they're playing clubs, and METALLICA is playing stadiums," he added.

METALLICA's self-titled LP in 2014 became the first album to sell sixteen million copies since Nielsen SoundScan started tracking sales in 1991.

"Metallica" was already certified sixteen times platinum on December 13, 2012 by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association Of America) for shipments in excess of sixteen million copies in the U.S.

The album in 2009 surpassed SHANIA TWAIN's 1997 record, "Come On Over", as the best-selling CD of the SoundScan era.

Not only was this past summer's tour METALLICA's biggest trek, it was also the band's largest production, requiring forty-eight trucks worth of equipment. The stage — which featured eighty-three laser fixtures, forty thousand speakers, a circular walk and a mini stage — took three days to set up.

The tour was METALLICA's first in support of the band's latest album, "Hardwired… To Self-Destruct", which came out in November.

AVENGED SEVENFOLD will release a "deluxe edition" of "The Stage" on December 15. The album was originally released in October 2016 with almost no promotion beforehand.

AVENGED SEVENFOLD's 2018 North American arena headlining tour will kick off January 12 at the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville with special guests BREAKING BENJAMIN and BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE. The trek will be North America's introduction to the electrifying "Stage" spectacle that drew rave reviews in Europe.