Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [230]
Meanwhile, back on terra firma, Metallica also set a new record for the most radio stations in history to sign up for an ‘exclusive’ broadcast, entitled The World Premiere of Death Magnetic. The programme, promoted by FMQB (the trade magazine for the US radio industry), was hosted by Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters, and featured the four Metallica members being interviewed. It was aired on more than 175 stations across the USA and Canada. Just for good measure, the first single from the album, ‘The Day That Never Comes’ was also issued and immediately topped both the Mainstream and Active Rock Charts, while seven more tracks from Death Magnetic simultaneously charted across three US radio formats – Alternative, Active Rock, and Rock – an almost unheard-of feat for any artist. There were similar blanket promotional efforts made in Europe and the UK. Britain’s Radio 1 turned 12 September into Metallica Day and devoted its entire twenty-four-hour output to the band and its new album, climaxing with the live broadcast of a special cut-price fan-club-members-only show at London’s O2 Arena. A similar event was held in Berlin.
Metallica didn’t quite get things all their own way, though. As ever, the internet was there to confound and connive. On 2 September, ten days before its official release date, a French record store knowingly jumped the gun and began selling copies of the album. Within hours, online versions of it were flying onto file-sharing networks around the world. This time, however, Metallica had anticipated the move and were ready with their response. ‘By 2008 standards, that’s a victory,’ a determinedly chilled Lars told US Today. ‘If you’d told me six months ago that our record wouldn’t leak until ten days out, I would have signed up for that. We made a great record, and people seem to be getting off on it way more than anyone expected.’ The internet community still had one more trick up its virtual sleeve, however. Two days before the official release date, a site called MetalSucks.net posted a link to a Russian website with a domain that offered the album in edited format. Cheekily dubbed Death Magnetic: Better, Shorter, Cut, the edited online album had cut each track by an average of two to three minutes, as if in imitation of a review by prominent Pitchfork online commentator Cosmo Lee, who’d declared the album redeemable only by cutting the exorbitantly lengthy tracks drastically.
Ultimately, however, Metallica now owned the internet in ways it would not have been considered possible in the bad old days of battling Napster. Six months after Death Magnetic came the release of Guitar Hero: Metallica. An Activision computer game for which the band had taken time out from promoting the album prior to release in order to film the various motion-capture scenes, GH:M featured twenty-eight of Metallica’s best-known numbers, plus twenty-one tracks from Metallica-endorsed artists, from obvious old-school choices such as Motörhead, Diamond Head and Judas Priest, to cool metal newbies like The Sword and Mastodon. Viewed from a certain angle, this was the shrewdest piece of business Metallica had done since inviting Bob Rock to help them become a commercial hit nearly twenty years before. Guitar Hero, a devilishly simple but infinitely clever computer game that distilled the essence of playing a musical instrument down to the push of a button, had already proved to be a revenue stream so great that it was