So many people streamed Kanye's 'Life of Pablo' it set a record and went platinum
Kanye West can add another platinum record to the wall and another "first" to his trophy case. "The Life Of Pablo" has gone platinum, the first album to reach that status through streams.
The milestone, first reported by Pitchfork, was confirmed to Mashable by a spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on Tuesday afternoon. The RIAA also gave Kanye a shoutout on a platform he knows all too well: Twitter.
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According to the RIAA's criteria, it takes "1,500 on-demand audio and/or video streams" to equal a single "unit" towards an album's status. With over 3 billion streams worldwide and 1.5 billion in the U.S., per The Verge, the album officially crossed the RIAA's platinum barrier. All seven of Kanye's studio albums and his Watch The Throne collaboration with Jay-Z have all gone platinum now.
The RIAA has yet to update Kanye's info on their Gold and Platinum website to reflect the new stats, though.
A few weeks after TLOP's release in February 2016, Kanye said he was done putting music on CD and was going to only release music online.
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Kanye's kept a pretty low profile after a bad 2016 but things are going much better, if a bit quieter, so far in 2017.
Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.