Until last year, when the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) began factoring streaming into what counts as an album sale, there weren’t anywhere near as many albums or singles qualified as gold or platinum albums (meaning sales of 500,000 and one million, respectively). However, now that 1,500 streams counts as an album sale, some albums that had been close, like Volbeat’s Beyond Hell, Above Heaven and Lamb of God’s Ashes of the Wake, were certified gold, while Five Finger Death Punch’s War is the Answer went platinum. The end of June found another group of singles and albums get awards. It seems like WEA did some accounting, as records by Muse, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Shinedown were certified gold and platinum in the past few months. Here’s what did well.

Multi-Platinum albums

Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication (6x platinum)
Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stadium Arcadium (3X platinum)

Platinum albums

Muse, Absolution
Skillet, Comatose
Muse, Black Holes and Revelations
Muse, Resistance
Shinedown, The Sound of Madness
The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Don’t You Fake It

Gold albums

Muse, The 2nd Law

Platinum singles

Disturbed, “The Sound of Silence”
Shinedown, “Sound of Madness”
Shinedown, “45”
Shinedown, “If You Only Knew”

Gold singles

Shinedown, “The Crow & The Butterfly”
Shinedown, “Diamond Eyes”
Shinedown, “Save Me”
Shinedown, “Devour”
Shinedown, “Bully”

You’ll notice that there are a lot more singles in there, and that’s likely motivated by streaming. Disturbed is the only really really recent certification, but that goes to show that if your band remains popular for some time, like Shinedown has, then things add up.

[via theprp]