On that note, Garth Brooks is even more of a prick than I could’ve fathomed, too.

To me, though, the biggest scam in platinum game is the multidisc certification. A two-disc set needs to sell half as much to get certified – gold, or platinum, or diamond or whatever – as a single disc. This is regardless of how much the disc actually costs at retail. Garth Brooks, when he was chasing the Beatles’ certification total in the ’90s, routinely released multidisc sets at super-cheap prices solely to score fatter certs; one million copies of Double Live would automatically get certified at double-platinum, even though the set retailed for barely more than 10 bucks; his five-disc Limited Series box sold for less than $30 but went double-platinum instantly by selling just 300,000 copies in its first week. (Back in the day, I tried to pitch SPIN to let me write a little exposé on Garth’s platinum obsession, but the editor neg’d me, saying quite reasonably that no one would ever comment on the record and I’d never find a source to prove any of this. It was pretty baldly obvious, however.)

Take a look at the RIAA’s list of the biggest-selling U.S. albums of all time, and you have to give about a quarter of the records on the list a sales haircut to get an accurate idea of how much they actually sold. The Wall is ranked #4, at 23-times-platinum, but that represents only 11.5 million in sales (which, in a fair system, would place it barely within the top 50). The Beatles’ three best-selling albums are supposedly the White Album, 1967-1970 (blue greatest hits) and 1962-1966 (red greatest hits), but that’s because each is a double; each of those titles sold fewer copies than Abbey Road (12 million) and Sgt. Pepper (10 million). And Physical Graffiti is ranked higher than Led Zeppelin II even though the former, a double, sold one-third fewer copies than the latter, a single. Shit like this drives me batty.

They should either reevaluate the system — which would of course cause serious problems/headaches with all albums previously certified — or abandon it entirely, in turn pissing off the entire hip-hop community by rendering any rhymes with the word “platinum” obsolete.

They should either reevaluate the system — which would of course cause serious problems/headaches with all albums previously certified — or abandon it entirely, in turn pissing off the entire hip-hop community by rendering any rhymes with platinum obsolete.