RIAA Certification

I have a question for some of our chart experts on the board. I was
flipping through the Billboard Pop Annual....specifically at the entries for
the 80s and noticed that there are quite a few singles that are certified
Gold by RIAA that didn't even crack the Top 20 and there are several
that didn't even crack the top 40. I know that the Billboard Top 40 isn't
entirely based on sales but that being said, I would think that any single
to get the gold certification would have received significant airplay as
well.   Can someone shed some light on how a single can sell
1,000,000 copies and not crack the Top 20 (or Top 40)? Just curious....

Here are a list of songs from the 80's that I am referring to:

Theme From "The Dukes Of Hazzard" - Waylon Jennings (#21)
She's A Bad Mama Jama - Carl Carlton (#21)
Double Dutch Bus - Frankie Smith (#30)
Swingin - John Anderson (#43)
Juicy Fruit - Mtume (#45)
Rockit - Herbie Hancock (#71)
Centipede - Rebbie Jackson (#24)
I Wonder If I Take You Home. - Lisa Lisa (#34)
Superbowl Shuffle - Chicago Bears (#41)
Supersonic - JJ Fad (#30)
Going Back To Cali - LL Cool J (#31)
Me So Horny - 2 Live Crew (#26)
Me Myself & I - De La Soul (#34)
One - Metallica (#35)

Some of the songs on the above list were big Soul or Country chart hits
that also crossed over pop. That might account for some of the sales.

Some of the songs on the list may have even received more top 40 airplay than reflected the airplay charts. An example would be Herbie Hancock's "Rockit", which recieved significant airplay on WLOL/Minneapolis in 1984-1985, but was never reported on their weekly survey. Not sure why WLOL didn't chart it.

Well, for one thing, an RIAA certification is for units shipped to retailers, not units sold at retail. Several of Elton John and Michael Jackson's hits that were certified gold were NOT upped to Platinum when their singles catalogs were re-certified in the 1990s. This is likely because, once returns from retailers were factored in, the singles were found not to have actually sold a million to consumers. "The Girl is Mine" and "The Bitch is Back" are two examples of this. "The Main Event" by Barbra Streisand is another example.

And musicmanatal is also correct -- once certification was lowered so "gold" meant 500,000 copies, all sorts of things in people's back catalogs were certified gold, when they only sold half a million.

torcan wrote: Brian W. wrote: And musicmanatal is also correct -- once certification was lowered so "gold" meant 500,000 copies, all sorts of things in people's back catalogs were certified gold, when they only sold half a million. I never liked that rule. I thought that when the lowering to 500,000 took place in 1989, it should have been for any single released that year or after. I didn't like the fact they could go back and "re-up". It means some gold singles are 500,000 and some are a million; some platinum singles are 1 million and some are 2 - and there's really no way to tell which is which.

I agree. It should not have been retroactive.

This discussion prompted me to look in the RIAA search engine, and surprisingly, three "standard" singles (as opposed to digital or ringtones) were recently upgraded to Platinum this past March -- Foreigner's "Hot Blooded," "Waiting For A Girl Like You," and "I Want To Know What Love Is."

A new example of what I mentioned above: their "Double Vision" single, originally certified Gold for a million sales in 1978, was NOT upgraded to Platinum. So it didn't actually sell a million at retail. All these years later, after returns were factored in, it wasn't quite a million after all.