Originally Posted By: jazzmammal
I still don't get where the money comes from for "album sales". They talk about "platinum" albums and that apparently still translates to millions for big name stars. What is that, where does that money come from?

Bob


As physical product sales have diminished, they've created a hybrid to determine gold/platinum status. Short version is that it's a combination of streams, downloads and physical product sales. Believe it or not, some of the bigger acts still sell a lot of CDs (relatively speaking).

Streaming, being a hybrid, has both a performance and a mechanical (sales) component. They've also lowered the bar for what constitutes gold or platinum status. Back in the day, gold was 500K units and platinum was 1 million. I don't know the exact number, but it's lower than that now.