Avenged Sevenfold frontman M. Shadows talked about opening for Metallica on their latest tour, saying at a Grammy Museum event in LA (via Blabbermouth):
“What you learn is that all the complaining and all the [negativity] online, or in this world, when you actually go to a stadium show, to sell out stadiums, it’s required that you have the ‘Black Album.’
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“You can play deep cuts all you want – you can play ‘Master Of Puppets’, this and that, but when they’re playing the ‘Black Album’ songs, every single person there is going crazy.
“And it’s like 60% of their audience are casual fans that only have the ‘Black Album,’ and that’s one thing that’s never gets reflected by their hardcore fans.
“To go do stadiums, you have to have a record that’s worked at radio, or crossed over at some point into the consciousness of the human collective, and they had that with the ‘Black Album.’
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“As much as we heard this and that, people complaining that they want deeper cuts from them – which I get – but when they play the ‘Black Album,’ they play ‘Sad But True’, ‘Enter Sandman’, ‘Unforgiven’, it’s just a different vibe, and you can tell that a lot of their audience are casual fans, which is something they’ve done and nurtured really well throughout their career.
“A lot of the metal bands that were around when Metallica put out the ‘Black Album,’ now they’re playing clubs, and Metallica is playing stadiums.”