The Smiley Smile Message Board

((I found this comment below, on a site discussing album certifications. So it's not my post. (apologize if I am breaking any kind of web etiquette)

But I thought it was interesting, especially in terms of Party!, which always seemed to me like it should have gone gold.))

I stumbled on an article recently that stated the minimum "RIAA shipment" required for a monaural album to be awarded Gold in the US during the early and mid Sixties was 751,880 -- emphatically not the 500,000 album sale that was the criterion for Gold from 1975 on. This piece argued convincingly that the RIAA based its album awards for mono albums on the average price of a mono album then, which it pegged at $3.99 at the retail level. The RIAA deemed the factory price (which the Gold Disc award was based on) to be one third of this -- that is, $1.33. From there it is a simple process to divide $1.33 into the minimum of $1,000,000 worth of sales in the US required for Gold and come up with the 751,880 copies to qualify. This was the calculation used for monaural albums up to 1968, so it seems to me this formula applies particularly to the Beach Boys because their first stereo album was "Friends" in 1968. Therefore, should not all the Gold Album awards for the Beach Boys up to that time (totalling 8) be accordingly revalued to this higher total of sales? Outside of the initial eight Gold qualifiers, "Beach Boys Christmas" and "Best Of the Beach Boys" perhaps took until at least 1968 to go Gold under a slightly adjusting formula. But this would also account for "Beach Boys Party" and "Pet Sounds" to be so slow in their sales being awarded -- though they probably reached a 500,000 level quite comfortably and early on. Feedback please.