METALLICA Lands On BILLBOARD's 'Hot Tours' Chart

METALLICA this week landed at position No. 6 on Billboard.com's "Hot Tours" list of top-grossing tours with $5.7 million in ticket sales from three performances in support of the band's new album, "Hardwired… To Self-Destruct", released on November 18. 69,407 tickets were sold to the band's shows in San Juan, Puerto Rico (October 26),a horseracing track in Bogotá, Colombia (November 1),and a concert at the national stadium of Costa Rica in San José (November 5). The tour also stopped in Ecuador and Guatemala, but those box office stats have not yet been reported.

Asked by Rolling Stone magazine if METALLICA is planning to embark on a U.S. stadium tour next year, drummer Lars Ulrich said: "We're still in the process of putting it all together. Right now we're doing an Asian run in January and then we're opening the new Royal Arena in Copenhagen, Denmark. Then we're doing Lollapalooza in South America and a few other things.

"We're still finalizing our U.S. plans for now. At this point, I don't want to say too much until it's completely dialed in. But we are definitely going to cover all of the U.S., and we look forward to getting out and doing a proper U.S. thing again. Obviously we've played a lot of one-offs and stuff, but we haven't really done a U.S. tour since 2009, so we look forward to that."

After METALLICA fans took only ten minutes in March to grab every ticket for the band's headlining concert at Minneapolis's new U.S. Bank Stadium on August 20, Ulrich said: "It's pretty awesome to be able to reach such a wide array of different music fans and people, but there are a lot of METALLICA fans in a lot of places of all ages, different backgrounds — culturally, socially, economically… the whole thing. And it's really cool. So we're very happy and appreciative that anybody shows up. And the fact that we can sell fifty, fifty-five thousand tickets to a show in Minneapolis still blows our minds, or probably blows our minds more than it ever did. And so it's kind of crazy, all of that. And we also, obviously, like to think that there are many different sides to what we do musically. We never like to be pigeonholed or to be stuck in one particular thing. So there's many different sides to METALLICA."

Lars went on to say that doesn't miss playing smaller venues "because we [still] play them. I mean, it's part of what we do. We're fortunate enough to be able to play giant, big-ass festivals," he added. "We played all seven continents in one calendar year, which was pretty awesome. We do it all. It's fun to be able to just kind of mix up the experience, not only for the fans, but for ourselves."