METALLICA's KIRK HAMMETT Says Each Video For 'Hardwired' Album Cost Between $15K and $20K To Produce

In the days leading up to the November 18, 2016 release of METALLICA's latest album, "Hardwired... To Self-Destruct", the band posted videos for every song from the disc, beginning with "Dream No More" and dropping new visuals every two hours through 6 a.m. EST the day before the album's arrival. The clips were shot all around the world and served as the sneak peek for fans to get a listen to every track days before the group's two-disc tenth studio album officially went on sale.

Asked in a brand new interview with Andy Hall of the Des Moines, Iowa radio station Lazer 103.3 if he was happy with how the "Hardwired" videos came out, METALLICA guitarist Kirk Hammett said (hear audio below): "Oh, yeah. Some of the videos that we made, I think, are some of the best videos we've ever made. The video for 'Dream No More', I think, is just totally amazing and reminds me of a Kenneth Anger film that was filmed in maybe the '50s or '60s. From an artistic point of view, I think it's really cool. And also, it really gives us an knee up on all the situations where a band puts out a new album and someone hears a track, a new track, and decides, 'Oh, I'm gonna make a YouTube video around this track,' and then, all of a sudden that becomes the predominant YouTube video for that song. That happens; that's a pretty common thing that happens in the YouTube world, and we were aware of that. And so we wanted to take matters into our own hands and make sure that the video that we made for the song was the predominant video that everyone saw for that song, rather than someone else's vision of the song itself."

Hammett was also asked if there are any older METALLICA songs that the band never made videos for that he thought would lend themselves well to strong visual interpretations. He responded: "It's interesting that you say that, because it's so much more inexpensive now, it's so much cheaper now, to make videos. It's crazy how much cheaper it is. Okay, I'll go back to 1988. The 'One' video cost us a lot of money — six figures — and we were just blown away by the cost. You couldn't figure it out, why it would cost so much. Okay, so you jump to 2016, 2017, a typical video that we made for 'Hardwired' nowadays cost between fifteen to twenty grand. It's totally amazing how much cheaper it is. And a lot of that is because of digital technology, things are smaller, things are more lightweight, more stealth. You can even use your iPhone to make a video if you really wanted to. Which leads me to the fact that since videos are so inexpensive these days, it would be interesting for us if we just retroactively decided to make a video for a track that we never made a video for — say, 'Carpe Diem Baby' off 'Reload'. It's a possibility these days, because it's so cheap to make videos. I don't know if we would actually find the inspiration to do something like that, but who knows? Maybe people will start doing retroactive videos."

"Hardwired… To Self-Destruct", was certified platinum on April 12 by the RIAA (Recording Association Of America). The platinum certification reflects a million equivalent album units, which blends traditional album sales, tracks sold from an album and on-demand audio and video streams.

The recent gain in "Hardwired… To Self-Destruct" sales is owed mostly to a concert ticket/album bundle sale redemption promotion with the band's stadium tour that went on sale on February 17. Redemptions of albums included with the purchase of a concert ticket register as a sale in the week the customer redeems/receives the album.