LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - NOVEMBER 01: Singer Ivan Moody of Five Finger Death Punch performs as the band kicks off its fall 2019 tour at The Joint inside the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on November 1, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
During Five Finger Death Punch’s October 14 show in Denver, CO, frontman Ivan Moody made an announcement that shocked the audience. He told the crowd that he plans to do one more Five Finger Death Punch record and then he’s going to retire from heavy metal. He didn’t mention if he was going to create music in another genre, but the main gist of his speech was that he is retiring to spend more time with his kids. His kids were on stage with him as he made the announcement.
“I wanted to tell you this. And nobody else in the world knows, Denver, so this is where it’s going to start. And what you do with it is up to you,” he told the audience. “The last fifteen years of my, life I have toured the world. I have seen every country, every city on this planet at least twice. That’s a fact. And through that time, as many of you parents know, I have missed a lot of time with my kiddos. So I made them a deal today, and I’m going to stick to it. After this year, I am going to make one more Five Finger Death Punch album and then I am retiring from heavy metal.”
He continued, “But I wanted to start that here and tell all of you, from day one when I decided to be a singer playing places like … the Bluebird Theater, the Ogden, and we were supposed to play Red Rocks, we’ll have to do that one more time. Can I play Red Rocks one more time? I owe you everything, Colorado, Five Finger Death Punch and every knucklehead on this planet, thank you.”
'Metallica' & The 9 Other Best-Selling Albums During the SoundScan Era
Metallica released their self-titled fifth studio album on August 12, 1991. Affectionately known as “The Black Album,” the LP became a game-changer for the band. It also had a massive impact on the music industry at large thanks to the game-changing technology then known as SoundScan, which premiered on March 1, 1991.
Per a feature piece from Billboard, “SoundScan, which is now known as MRC Data, measured album sales as they happened — stores scanned bar codes at the checkout register — and over the next few months [after its launch] it upended the conventional music business wisdom about what sold, as well as when and how. It revealed the popularity of several genres — alternative rock, country, hip-hop, harder metal — that had been seen as commercially marginal compared to bread-and-butter pop-rock bands.”
Basically, SoundScan provided real-time data of what was actually selling at record stores and other retailers, and it has provided proof of Metallica’s popularity.
How popular are the metal icons? “The Black Album” is the biggest selling record in the United States since the launch of SoundScan.
Metallica, however, has some very unique company on the list of the biggest selling albums of the SoundScan era. Scroll through the gallery below to see which titles join them in the top ten.
