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Kanye West album goes platinum through streams alone
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In this Dec. 13, 2016, photo, Kanye West enters Trump Tower in New York. (AP/Seth Wenig)
K
ing Kanye has done it again. His most recent album, The Life of Pablo, just went platinum, thanks to more than 1.5 billion song streams in the United States.
While it is impressive when artists go platinum by selling 1 million albums, it’s not entirely unheard of among popular artists. What makes West’s accomplishment so special is that it happened not through album sales or paid downloads, but entirely through streams.
Last year, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) updated their guidelines to include streaming numbers in an artist’s certified status. As TechCrunch explains it, now “150 streams of a song would equal one song download, and 10 song downloads would equal one album download” and due to this, “an artist’s songs would have to be streamed 1,500 times for it to be counted as an album sale.”
Read also: Washington U. class focuses on Kanye West
Typically, albums don’t have to be streamed 1.5 billion times to make up 1 million in sales, as sales and streams are combined to hit the total. But in the case of Life of Pablo, West never actually made his album available for sale through iTunes or similar platforms, and instead released it on Tidal, before expanding to other streaming services like Spotify.
Physical sales of the album, which he did release on his personal website, were not counted toward the total. (sul/kes)
