Metallica + Slipknot Are YouTube’s Biggest Metal Bands
The YouTube Music Chart is dominated by Roddy Rich (45.6 million views this week) with Top 10 appearances from Eminem (34.8M), Lil’ Wayne (28.8M), and Billie Eilish (27.7M), among others, in the United States. But scroll further down — like, way down — and hard rock and metal artists begin to appear. Metallica (6.55M) is the only metal band in the Top 100. But the picture (pardon the pun) improves on a global scale.
Metallica racked up 29 million views this week worldwide. Slipknot had 13.8 million, with most of their fans tuning in from the United States (3.92M), Brazil (1.17M), Mexico (1.05M) and the U.K. Avenged Sevenfold was close behind, with 13.2 million views.
Not only is Metallica the largest metal band in the world (with the biggest album of the Nielsen Soudnscan era, among other milestones) but they are particularly active on YouTube.
Classic music videos for “Nothing Else Matters,” “Enter Sandman,” “The Unforgiven” and “One” account for close to 2 billion views between them. And while they haven’t released an official “music video” in the traditional sense for a few years, their channel is regularly refreshed with content. In just the last four weeks they’ve posted fifteen different professional quality videos from 2019’s world tour, accounting for another 2 million views. Among them: “The Memory Remains” (shot in Wichita, Kansas), “Ride the Lightning” (Cincinnati, Ohio) and “Blackened” (Nashville, Tennessee).
More of this week’s worldwide hard rock / metal numbers on YouTube:
- Queen - 42.9M
- Guns N’ Roses - 21.7M
- AC/DC - 20M
- Skillet - 19M
- Rammstein - 16.9M
- Green Day - 16.5M
- Nirvana - 15.8M
- Nickelback - 11.8M
- Five Finger Death Punch - 11.6M
- Led Zeppelin - 11.1M
- System Of A Down - 10.8M
- Evanescence - 10.4M
- Disturbed - 9.44M
- Pearl Jam - 8.57M
- My Chemical Romance - 8.3M
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