Congratulations to two of rap’s biggest acts – ScHoolboy Q and Rae Sremmurd. Each of their albums Oxymoron and SremmLife are now certified platinum by the RIAA.
Q’s album came out in early 2014 while Slim Jxmmi and Swae Lee’s LP came out in January 2015. Now both acts are prepping their follow-up projects: Q’s Blank Face drops July 8th while SremmLife 2 was just pushed back to August 12.
It’s interesting to see albums like this go platinum now, though each act may be experiencing recent increases in sales and streams because they’ve both been rolling out new albums. But what these plaques – and the increasing amount of them doled out each week – really indicate is how streaming is changing the way we see a platinum record. For awhile in the late ’90s and early ’00s, platinum albums were events and double platinum always seemed within reach. Then the internet fucked everything up, sales were chopped down at the legs and platinum albums became as rare as yetis.
But now that the RIAA has factored streaming into their certification algorithm, platinum albums are becoming more common again. Some argue that it simply takes less to make an album go platinum now; after all, where you used to have to spend over $10 to go out and buy one album, now you can spend that amount to stream millions of albums per month. But while that may be true, the RIAA still had to adjust their formula to reflect the consumption patterns of the general public, and since streaming is clearly the future (if not the present), they made the wise choice.
So while debate will continue about whether or not platinum certification holds as much weight as it does a decade ago, industry standards will hopefully continue to adapt to technology and the rapidly-shifting music industry. We have nothing but congrats for Q and the Rae Sremmurd brothers.
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