Let me explain myself:

When an album is being released, what is the point of keeping the traditional certification system? Certifying both an album and a song makes no sense in the streaming era since it basically means counting the same streams twice: once for the album units and another time for song units. It's very misleading and deceptive.

In my opinion, it should be one or the other: either you count streams for your album's certification or you count streams for your songs.

What do you think?

No, but eventually they need to reweigh how they're counted unless they don't care a song is 3X Diamond in 20 years

1 minute ago, Armani. said:

No, but eventually they need to reweigh how they're counted unless they don't care a song is 3X Diamond in 20 years

I agree but it still doesn't make counting streams twice fair.

If the song contributes to the album's overall performance, then it makes sense to include its sales in the album's total as well. I don't see why that has to change or how that is deceptive.

It is deceptive if you tack on 7 to 8 year old songs to boost the stats maybe, like how Cardi B did.

So maybe a rule should be to only count songs that appear on the standard version of the album.

Edited December 18, 2025Dec 18 by KatyPrismSpirit

I think certifications made sense back when sales were harder to track or find no matter how we count them.

I find it crazy that in the big year 2025 (almost 2026) no market has done anything to provide a "current" sales updated frequently (even if it's rounded). It's just so easy and would make so much sense while also providing a good web traffic that they could use for ads.

Just now, Squall said:

I agree but it still doesn't make counting streams twice fair.

Well that's more cause of the stupidity of people combining songs & albums than cause of the certifications themselves tbh

Just now, KatyPrismSpirit said:

If the song is part of the album's overall performance it makes sense to count the songs' sales for the album as well. I don't see why that has to change or how that is deceptive.

Because saying an album sold 7M units + 20M song units (I'm just throwing numbers) does not make any sense since and it is factually wrong as the same song contributed to both of these numbers. Morgan Wallen is actually a great example of this since his first two albums are 9X Platinum each and he has tons of multi-Platinum songs while barely moving any pure sale.

Edited December 18, 2025Dec 18 by Squall

2 minutes ago, elincomprendid said:

Well that's more cause of the stupidity of people combining songs & albums than cause of the certifications themselves tbh

I agree, that's why I think it could be better to just keep a certification system based on albums (unless a song isn't attached to any), especially since the RIAA doesn't care and counts streams retroactively anyway.

Edited December 18, 2025Dec 18 by Squall

It's all so absolutely ridiculous at this point.

Morgan Wallen looking like he's one of the best selling artists of all time because of this absurdity.

Edited December 18, 2025Dec 18 by BJ1998

Streaming def made certifications look weirder than ever

Personally think certifications should be for whole artistic album projects, but I am not super into tracking charting stats, etc.

45 minutes ago, Squall said:

Because saying an album sold 7M units + 20M song units (I'm just throwing numbers) does not make any sense since and it is factually wrong as the same song contributed to both of these numbers. Morgan Wallen is actually a great example of this since his first two albums are 9X Platinum each and he has tons of multi-Platinum songs while barely moving any pure sale.

But people don't really do that unless they're trying to inflate numbers

They say the album sold 7m units and 2m of that was generated from the singles.

10 song units is an album unit.

Just now, Kodak Energy said:

But people don't really do that unless they're trying to inflate numbers

They say the album sold 7m units and 2m of that was generated from the singles.

10 song units is an album unit.

No one presents certifications as an alternative though, especially labels. Same goes for Twitter: the amount of times I saw stupid tweets about "the most certified eras in the US"

1 hour ago, Squall said:

the amount of times I saw stupid tweets about "the most certified eras in the US"

99% of the time they are from katy kats too.

It's a bit weird because in a way - a Diamond album with 5 singles that were platinum is almost more impressive than a Diamond album fueled by 5 Diamond singles

But streaming is how an album gets consumed 90% of the time...the line between a singles artist and albums artist is blurred now

I mean Flo Rida's first album to make top 50 year end was in 2016 with his EP because "My House" was big on streaming even though before then, he had hits but poor album sales that struggled to make top 100 year end

They should've started weighting them when digital downloads became a thing: 3 digital downloads = 1 physical single.

It became way too easy to get a platinum single after 2005.

They could be like Japan and have completely separate certifications for physical, digital and streaming. Like M by Ayumi hamasaki is certified million for physical, platinum for digital and gold for streaming.