Articles — RIAA awards

Record awards in their earliest days were pretty plain, starting with simple dark-stained wood framed affairs with white matte boards in the 60s and early 70s. The period of 1975 thru the mid-80s brought silver and gold painted frames and charcoal-colored mattes. This was followed by a graduation to some pretty pedestrian black plastic-covered frame/black matte awards from the mid-80s through late 90s.   Just before the millennium, however, the RIAA loosened up its' previously strict design standards. This opened up the creative floodgates for award designers, who responded with an explosion of new designs. The companies that designed these new award...

Want to sort out the myths from reality? While there are many more than ten myths about RIAA awards, we've covered some of them here: 1. Myth: On an album award, if the number of tracks on the record disc do not match up with the album being recognized by the award, the award is fake. Reality: It was most common for record labels to send any record they had available, and not the one being recognized, to the RIAA award manufacturer for an award. Rarely, exceptions to this occur. Here's one example of an exception with a real metal mother...

People ask us all the time which awards have the most value to collectors, and what attributes make them most valuable. It first needs to be said, to mince a popular cliché, that value is in the eye of the beholder or, in this case, collector. And despite our main article photo depicting rising stacks of gold, collectors cannot depend on any collectible increasing in value. With that disclaimer out of the way, we'll take a stab at some advice given what we have seen in our own extensive number of sales and the marketplace generally, focusing on the last five...

In this article we take a close look inside every detail of RIAA "floater" awards, which were made from 1975-81. The purpose of this article is to help collectors of these awards know if a floater award they may be considering is authentic. 1975-81 RIAA "floater" award This article reveals some very detailed information about the construction of the awards from these eras that we previously did not want to put out there. Why? Because we don't want to arm those intent on making fake awards with any information that they use to create more authentic-looking fakes that could fool buyers. However, we...

Check out this list of the top 10 highest prices attained by RIAA awards in the marketplace. These pieces of music memorabilia have clearly become very popular with collectors.