Gold, Platinum, and Parental Advisories: How Hoopla Use RIAA with myCARTS

Taylor Swift is Multiplatinum, of course.

Sabrina Carpenter is Platinum, but her career is young and she could very well be Multiplatinum
before long.

Linkin Park has been Gold for almost 25 years.

Most of us have at least heard of the Gold and Platinum certifications that the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA) oversees, but what do they mean, exactly? And how do they
impact your library’s music collection?

Hit Makers Making Hits

The RIAA is the trade organization that advocates for recorded music and the people and
companies that create it in the United States. The organization helps music creators produce and
distribute their work across the globe according to standard technical and data guidelines, so
consumers know what to expect and get the quality they deserve.

As the music industry’s premier program for celebrating artistic achievement in the marketplace,
the RIAA employs the Gold® & Platinum® Program as a means to recognize albums—and their
respective artists—that have reached various sales benchmarks. An album must sell:

  • More than 500,000 copies to be considered Gold
  • More than one million copies to be considered Platinum
  • More than two million copies to be considered Multiplatinum

We use the RIAA website to regularly update our database with the most current artist
certifications. This information is then used to populate the Hit Makers shopping carts.

Midwest Tape’s Hit Makers myCARTS plan offers libraries the ability to receive shopping carts—
uploaded weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly—pre-loaded with pre-street date physical titles from
artists based on the RIAA certifications. For example, if a library chooses to sign up for the
Platinum-level Hit Makers plan, and Sabrina Carpenter announces a new album, they’ll
automatically see that title in a cart once it becomes available for pre-order.

So that the Hit Makers plan only offers titles from the most popular current artists, each artist’s
status remains active in our database for seven years from the date of certification. Pre-street
date releases from well-known artists with albums that were certified more than seven years ago
are included in the Must Have myCARTS plan.

Parental Advisory vs. Edited

The RIAA also provides parents with the tools they need to make educated decisions for their
children.

The organization owns the Parental Advisory Explicit Content Trademark (or as it’s more
commonly known, the “PAL Mark”, or as it’s even more commonly known, the parental advisory
label). Any artist or record company that wishes to use the PAL Mark to label music according to
RIAA’s standards may do so free of charge once they submit a license agreement.

Because of this, many artists who record an album that carries the parental advisory label may
choose to release an edited version of the album alongside the original. While some artists find
that this compromises the integrity of the original recording, the strategy helps to mitigate lost
sales due to the presence of the parental advisory label.

The myCARTS program offers libraries with several options when it comes to parental advisory
titles and their corresponding edited versions. Libraries can select to have their carts loaded with
either the unedited (parental advisory label) version of the title, the edited version, both versions,
or neither. They’re also given a fifth option: the parental advisory version ONLY if an edited
version is unavailable.

Of course, as with all titles, myCARTS pre-loaded carts can be edited at any time before placing
the order, meaning that selectors can add or remove whatever version they see fit.

myCARTS, Your Collection

Midwest Tape is committed to physical media for libraries—now and in the future. And our music
experts keep their fingers on the pulse of emerging trends in the industry, including the latest from
the RIAA.

For more information on how their expertise—and the myCARTS music plan—can help
strengthen your library’s music collection, contact us at 800-875-2785 or email Lisa Bettinger at
lbettinger@midwesttapes.com.