Following a confusing Twitter announcement claiming Rihanna’s long-awaited studio album Anti had gone Platinum in a mere 15 hours (meaning it had moved over one million copies), the RIAA announced an update to their certification metrics. “Leave the Night On”, “House Party” and “Take Your Time” have all been number-ones. (The RIAA began counting digital streaming toward their Digital Single Award in May 2013.) Among the artists benefiting from this change in the system include Halsey, Alt-J, Elle King and Vance Joy, all of whose most recent albums were certified Gold today.
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Look for a fifth single from the project, “Make You Miss Me”, coming later this month. This shift saw Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, Big Sean’s Dark Sky Paradise and a few other albums officially recognized as platinum-selling albums.
That means 17 albums have now either achieved Gold or Platinum status, or new heights in Multi-Platinum status. Michael Jackson’s Thriller has reached 32x Platinum, as well.
“We know that music listening – both for albums and songs – is skyrocketing, yet that trend has not been reflected in our album certifications”, said Cary Sherman, chairman and chief executive officer of the USA industry body.
The ways in which the RIAA has historically tallied its numbers, however, have not always been strictly sales-based; the group previously counted units shipped to retailers, but not necessarily sold, within their calculations.
Demonstrating the sheer scale of streaming taking place, the RIAA has also had to revise up its measure for singles, with 150 streams now equivalent to one sale, as opposed to the 100 figure that was first introduced two years ago.
Under this policy streaming will not be counted individually. The dichotomous system seemed to provide a welcome kind of balance, though one could extrapolate less and less from a sociological perspective from the raw sales data than the ever-more-detailed Billboard charts.
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One of the few prominent artists to reject the technology is British ballad singer Adele, who did not put her latest album “25” on streaming sites.
