Once upon a time, Metallica’s music was hard to find on services like iTunes and Spotify, but the legendary metal band’s latest action shows that it has changed its tune a bit. It has posted its newest album, titled Hardwired…to Self-Destruct, in its entirety on YouTube.
YouTube is an ideal distribution platform for Metallica’s new album, which goes well beyond the music itself. The band created ten new music videos, each attached to a song on Hardwired, and uploaded all of them to its official channel. There, videos from the new album join more than 20 others in a playlist that does a nice job of recapping the past three decades of Metallica’s career. The band also used live streaming to further engage its fans by offering them access to a performance delivered from the House of Vans in London.
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Metallica is an interesting partner for YouTube for two reasons. For one, even people who don’t listen to the band know that its drummer, Lars Ulrich, was one of the standard bearers in the fight against illegal file sharing in the early 2000s. The fact that he and his bandmates have softened their stances on digital streaming indicates just how much that format has become an accepted part of the music industry.
The launch of the new album also comes at a time when many artists, including Katy Perry and Trent Reznor, are speaking out about the terms YouTube offers to musicians. Critics of the video site have cited a perceived “value gap,” which they say prevents royalties from scaling properly with the site’s ad revenue. Clearly, though, the split YouTube offers is good enough for Metallica, and so the latest album from the metal titans — which has received some kind reviews — is now available for your listening pleasure.
