RIAA equates online listening to album sales

The American Recording Industry Association (RIAA), 16 years after the first release of Napster and 15 years after the advent of iTunes, sat down for arithmetic and came up with new rules according to which music artists would be awarded for the frequency of their playback.

Historically, performers (and their record companies) have been awarded for selling albums. The album, sold in a circulation of 500,000 copies, became gold, one million platinum, more than two million multiplatinum. These statistics were conducted in the era of vinyl, audio cassettes and CDs. Now, these statistics include streaming tracks.

After a long sitting at the calculators, the RIAA worked out the following rules: 1,500 listening to audio or video over the Internet are equivalent to selling 10 tracks or one album. The RIAA also shares paid song downloads and streaming them on demand - 150 streams are equal to 1 download.

The RIAA has already selected 17 nominees who will receive awards calculated according to the new scheme. Among them - Michael Jackson's album "Thriller", which has become multi-platinum already 32-fold.

Gold and platinum awards were invented in 1958 with the aim of assessing the popularity of artists and introducing a standard for measuring the commercial success of their recordings. Over the past 58 years, the RIAA has been awarded around 30,000 certificates for the number of albums and singles sold. The full list of nominees can be studied on a special page of the siteRIAA.