Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo Makes History, Going Platinum Entirely on Streams
Images via Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty, Def Jam/Good Music Music News Kanye West
After a protracted album rollout, a gloriously messy live debut, abrupt concert cancellations, a brief hospitalization and a meeting with then President-elect Donald Trump, Kanye West has some unequivocally good news about his eighth LP The Life of Pablo.
It’s official. #TLOP is @KanyeWest‘s eighth RIAA Platinum (or higher) album! @DefJamRecords ???? pic.twitter.com/NhDMNrxR5v
— RIAA (@RIAA) April 4, 2017
As you see above, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) confirmed that West’s album attained platinum status. Although, as Billboard points out, the album was briefly available for sale on West’s website in February (and the album is actually still selling on the website for $20), Pablo’s stratospheric streaming numbers alone were enough to propel it to platinum status.
The album is reported to have had more than three billion streams worldwide and 1.5 billion streams in the U.S., which are just sort of preposterous numbers. And those large figures certainly propelled Pablo to the top of the charts in 2016.
Check out the still-great video for Kanye’s “Fade” below, and read Paste’s Pablo review here.