Online streams will now count toward RIAA gold and platinum certification
The RIAA has announced plans to lump online stream counts into its calculations for gold and platinum single certification. In the new system, 100 streams of a track will count as one digital download, though singles will still have to “sell” 500,000 copies to get gold certification and a million copies to go platinum. To put it in simpler terms: Because Psy’s “Gangnam Style” has been played literally 1.5 billion times on YouTube, the single has now gone platinum 15 times, just from that site alone.
