The rapper’s 4:44 album has gone platinum less than a week after its release on Tidal, the Recording Industry Association of America announced Wednesday.
NOTE: To sell platinum is defined as selling over 1,000,000 unit copies of a record. While 1 unit = 150 sales. Hence 150 x 1,000,000 = 150million sold in 4 days.
The album was released on June 30 exclusively to Tidal subscribers and Sprint customers.
Last year, the RIAA changed the rules on judging album sales to adapt to streaming music: 1,500 song or video streams are equivalent to 10 track sales or one album sale.
The question remains how 1.5 billion streams of “4:44” tracks were streamed in five days, but RIAA told Variety that “Sprint-enabled downloads were a significant factor” into the final total.
In 2013, JAY-Z and Tidal partnered with Samsung for “Magna Carta Holy Grail.” Samsung purchased 1 million downloads and made the album available to Galaxy owners 72 hours before the official release.
Tidal briefly offered a free download of the album for non-subscribers, but the promo code stopped working Sunday night.
JAY-Z’s latest honor marks his 13th platinum solo album, the most of any hip hop artist in history; he has 17 platinum albums total.