If someone wanted to know what heavy metal music is, you could do a lot worse than hand them a copy of Dio‘s finest work, Holy Diver.

Amazon is currently offering you the chance to download Holy Diver for $5 as part of their December 100 MP3 Deals for $5.

“Stand Up And Shout,” “Holy Diver,” and “Rainbow In The Dark” are among the greatest metal tunes ever written with some huge guitar riffs. This is one of the greatest metal albums of all time.

As always this offer expires at the end of the month so download before December 31, 2011 11:59 PST. If you would prefer a physical copy the CD version is available for $7.99.

The official website for Gibson guitars has released what they perceive to be the top 50 metal songs of all time. Gibson.com’s writers and editors worked on compiling the list over several weeks, releasing 10 entries at a time, and recently released the top 10, which declared the number one metal song to be “Master of Puppets” by Metallica.

In some ways, the number one spot for Metallica is fitting, considering 2011 is the 25th anniversary of the release of their Master of Puppets album. Having said that though, metalheads are notorious for having fierce and strong opinions about what they consider to be their “top songs,” on top of their fierce and strong opinions about what bands are or are not even metal.

With just a few more days left til the end of February, now’s the time to get in on Amazon’s $5.00 MP3 album deal of the month for February 2011: 100 Albums For $5.

Here’s some of my favorite picks from the 100 albums on sale: Dio‘s first album Holy Diver; John Lennon‘s Imagine; Pat Benatar‘s Crimes Of Passion; and Fugazi‘s 13 Songs. There’s plenty of other selections from other genres (I saw some R. Kelly, Lil Wayne, Lenny Kravitz, Usher, The Judds, Carrie Underwood, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, The Smiths, Violent Femmes, Frank Sinatra, and many more.)

There’s also a $.69 Song Sale (they are typically $.99 each) where thousands of songs are discounted. You can go to the main page and then view by genre from the list on the left — there’s 102 hard rock/heavy metal songs to choose from (you know that’s my area) from bands like Megadeth, Accept, Sepultura, Tesla, Free, and Corrosion Of Conformity. (If you’re into Latin music, there’s over 1,155 tunes.)

In 1992, Vivian Campbell joined the mega-success rock group Def Leppard, stepping into the second lead guitarist slot left vacate by Steve Clark, who had died the year before. At the time, Campbell had gone a few years out of the spotlight after leaving David Coverdale’s rock supergroup Whitesnake before signed on with the Leps, a position he’s had for nearly 20 years that remains his most high-profile gig to date.

The Irish-born Campbell, who got big break back in 1983 as Ronnie James Dio’s hot-shot lead guitarist in the former Black Sabbath frontman’s newly created solo band, Dio, has always said that the guitar parts in Def Leppard weren’t really challenging to him and he was fine with that. Now, the guitarist is finally bitching about it, complaining that fellow Lep guitarist Phil Collen gets all the good guitar parts. Let’s just say, I told you so.

The FREE MP3 song download of the day over at Amazon is Dio‘s Stand Up And Shout (Live).

Click the link to the song, then click on the “Get MP3” button on the top right corner of the product page and it will download the song for NO charge.

The free download is only for today until midnight PST, so grab it right now!

The song comes from Dio’s Holy Diver Live and the MP3 version of the entire double-live album is also on sale right now for only $7.99.

[UPDATE 7/9/2010: The deal for “Stand Up and Shout” is over, but today there’s a new FREE mp3 the album, the song “Holy Diver (Live)” — so grab that right now!]