Articles — RIAA awards

MusicGoldmine recently acquired a stellar collection of rare RIAA "white matte" record awards. For those not familiar, this type of RIAA awards are the rarest and most valuable of all RIAA awards. They were made from 1964 through 1974 in quite limited numbers for each title by only one company, the New York Frame & Picture Co. Also worth noting is that artist-presented awards are always the most valuable*, when they are genuine. Fortunately, all of these awards are genuine. If you'd like to know how we determine whether white matte RIAA awards are genuine, check out our detailed guide...

On March 16, 1999 the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the organization that issues music product sales awards, launched the RIAA Diamond Award program. It was created to recognize albums which have achieved the impressive milestone of selling 10 million copies or more in the U.S.  The award was designed by renowned crystal designer Peter Yenawine. Yenawine was a (continued below...) ___________________________________________________________________________________________ Check out this YouTube™ video telling the story of the RIAA Diamond Award and its' 1999 launch (Also, subscribe to our MusicGoldmine YouTube channel here for more content about music and collectibles): ______________________________________________________________________________________________ master designer at Steuben Glass—and...

Official RIAA awards have historically only been made available to those who worked on the recordings in a creative, technical or marketing capacity. According to the RIAA: "Any artist, label or other affiliated party who contributed to an RIAA certified title (riaa.com/gold-platinum/) and would like to obtain a physical plaque, can do so." (Source: riaa.com, underline added). What about RIAA awards made available to fans? A trend that has seen some minor growth in recent years is for artists to make arrangements with the RIAA for fans to be able to directly purchase official awards with their own personal names as the presentation....

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...