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Articles — RIAA awards

Record Awards As Art: From Mild To Wild

Posted by James Duncan on

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...

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RIAA Awards Fans Can Buy: Are They A Good Deal?

Posted by James Duncan on

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....

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5 Tips To Spot Fake RIAA Awards

Posted by James Duncan on

One of the tricky parts of collecting RIAA record awards is avoiding the fakes that do occasionally exist in the marketplace. Here are five tips that can help you avoid buying a fake RIAA award: 1. Certification: Does the certification date versus the award type make sense? This can be a very tricky area because a recording is not certified officially by the RIAA until the record label submits the paperwork. In some cases, there can be years-long gaps before Platinum was issued on recordings which in reality quickly sold numbers that were at the Platinum level. This is fairly common...

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New To Collecting Gold & Platinum Records?

Posted by James Duncan on

New to collecting record awards, popularly known as "gold" or "platinum" records? Or have some knowledge and just want to know more about these fascinating pieces of music history?  Learn about RIAA awards and what makes them great to add to your collection. Subscribe to our free bi-weekly newsletter and get our 55-page MusicGoldmine RIAA and Record Award Guide FREE plus a 15% off discount code here.

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