Showing posts with label platinum record. Show all posts
Showing posts with label platinum record. Show all posts

Monday, October 20, 2014

2014 First Year Ever Without A Platinum Album

No Platinum Albums
With all the albums that have come out this year it's pretty amazing that exactly zero have been certified platinum by the RIAA. Yes, you read that right - there have been no million selling albums this year yet!

What's worse, it doesn't look like there will be any by the end of the year either. The two closest are Beyonce's self-titled album and Lorde's Pure Heroine, but both aren't even reached the 800,000 mark yet and their sales have slowed in recent months.

Actually, there has been one million seller - the soundtrack to Frozen has sold over 3 million, but that's a soundtrack and not a popular artist.

Back when the business was at its peak, there might have been 20 to 30 million sellers by this time just about every year (both recent releases and catalog), but those days are long gone.

On the other hand, there have been 60 platinum songs so far this year, but even that's down about 20% from last year, as the music consumer moves to streaming instead of purchase.

Yes, we're definitely in a singles era where the song is vastly more important than the album, but we're also in a very important YouTube era where a song can get 100 million views yet sell less than 10,000 copies. And today, that's considered a bit hit.
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Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Platinum After 46 Years

Gold Record image
There's always been a big injustice in the UK when it comes to issuing gold and platinum record awards. For instance, the 5 original Beatles engineers never received either award for the huge selling records they worked on because no record released before 1973 was eligible. After that point in time, if a record reached silver (60,000), gold (100,000) or platinum (300,000) levels, the awards were only issued if it was requested by the record label, and in many cases they never were (like in the case of Apple Records and The Beatles).

That all changed last month when the BPI (Britain's version of our RIAA) decided to automatically grant these awards regardless if the label requests it or not.

That means that all those who worked on big selling albums from 1973 onward will finally be getting their just due. It's been a long time coming, and it's too late for many who deserve it, but it's finally great that all those who were essential to the big hits from that era that we still love so much will finally be recognized.
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