14 DAY TRIAL // The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has updated its music albums certification standard to include on-demand audio or video streaming as a parameter for awarding its Gold and Platinum awards.
Until February 1, 2016, a music album would have received the Gold certification if it sold more than 500,000 copies, and the Platinum title if it sold more than 1,000,000. This included classic retail sales, but also digital downloads.
1,500 song streams = 1 album sale
From now on, the RIAA formula for calculating album sales is the following: 1,500 on-demand audio or video song streams are equal to 10 track sales, which in turn are equal to one album sale.
So if one of Kanye West's songs from his upcoming album, The Life of Pablo, are streamed 15,000 times via Tidal, that will count as ten album sales, even if some users would have never listened to the rest of the songs on the album.
Back in 2013, RIAA has tested this algorithm with the Gold and Platinum certification standard used for individual "singles." From 2013 to 2016, 100 on-demand audio or video streams were considered a sale for the artist's track. This counted when RIAA awarded Gold and Platinum certifications to music singles for the past years.
RIAA seems to have been very satisfied with this algorithm, so it expanded it to full albums, but also tweaked the singles certification calculation values. From now on, a track sale will be considered 150 on-demand streams, not 100 like until now.
1.5 billion streams to go Platinum
RIAA officials justified this change "to reflect the enormous growth of streaming consumption in the two plus years since that ratio was set."
Accordingly, RIAA has also recalculated Gold and Platinum certifications for past albums. Based on the new calculation method, the most successful album of all time, Michael Jackson's Thriller, is now a 32-times Platinum album. Until February 1, 2016, Thriller was a 30-times Platinum album.
This means that in the past years, Internet users have watched videos and listened to tracks from Michael's Thriller album for over three billion times. Basically, to go Platinum just off SoundCloud, an artist would need users to stream his album's songs 1.5 billion times.