METALLICA: Headed For Another No. 1?

METALLICA, who moved nearly 418,000 copies of "St. Anger" from Thursday to Sunday last week, are expected to chalk up another 400,000 or so in the album's first full week on sale, according to Hits Daily Double.

This tally may not be enough to hold off the challenge for the No. 1 spot from Luther Vandross' "Dance With My Father" (J Records),which is also said to be headed for a first week of about 400k.

Meanwhile, Capitol's RADIOHEAD are seeing an impressive first week for their "Hail to the Thief", with early counts pointing toward a first week just shy of 250k.

In other news, more than 800,000 bonus MP3s have so far been downloaded from Metallicavault.com, a web site that contains hours of downloadable METALLICA live recordings, demos and B-sides for free, according to Edward Bender, spokesman for Speakeasy, the independent broadband provider that implemented and is hosting the site.

"Our dream is to make this site the yellow pages of METALLICA," former Epic Records VP and Hollywood Records president Bob Pfeifer, the band's liaison between creative vision and technological realization, told MSNBC.com. "We'd like it to be a highly organized, high-quality listing of everything. I'd like this to be the temple of METALLICA."

Pfeifer also wrote the concept and design documents for the band's forthcoming video game, due in 2005, which he described as "Road Warrior meets METALLICA." A trailer for the "landmark, high-action vehicle combat game", which will also feature original METALLICA music, is available for download from the site.