The Recording Industry Association of America just hit a milestone that sounds impressive until you realize how rarely it happens: 200 songs have now been certified diamond. That’s 25 years of the award’s existence condensed into a club so exclusive that a song needs at least 10 million equivalent units to join it.
But here’s the thing that actually matters: most of these 200 songs arrived in the last five years.
The first diamond certification came in 1999, three years after Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Something About the Way You Look Tonight / Candle in the Wind” was retroactively honored for its massive physical sales. Then the award sat there, barely moving. For the better part of two decades, diamonds were something the industry whispered about. By 2018, fewer than 50 songs had achieved the status. Now, in 2025, we’re racing toward 200.
What changed? Streaming happened. And it fundamentally rewired how we measure success in music.
The Streaming Explosion Changed Everything
The diamond award’s definition shifted in a way that sounds technical but carries real weight: in 2004, the RIAA started counting streams alongside physical sales. That single decision turned certification from a physical relic into a streaming-era metric almost overnight.
You can see it in the data. “Closer” by The Weeknd and Nine Inch Nails hit diamond in 2018, riding the wave of streaming’s dominance. “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X became the fastest song ever to go diamond, achieving it in less than a year from release in October 2019. That would have been mathematically impossible in the ’90s, when streaming was still a fringe concept.
The artists who get multiple diamonds now are the ones who’ve cracked the streaming code. Drake leads with 15 diamond-certified songs (and counting). Post Malone sits at nine. Rihanna, The Weeknd, and Bruno Mars are all tied at seven. These aren’t just commercially successful artists. They’re streaming behemoths, the kind of acts whose songs hit repeat buttons millions of times over.
It’s Not About Gatekeeping Anymore
Here’s what’s wild: the RIAA had to lower what diamond means, relatively speaking. A song that sells 10 million equivalent units today reaches a different listener base than one that did in 1999. In 1999, moving 10 million physical copies meant something different from streaming 10 million times. Streams are cheaper, easier, more passive. You can accidentally stream a song. You had to intentionally buy one.
Yet the same certification threshold persists. That’s not really a fair comparison, but it’s the system we’ve got.
What it does reveal is that streaming has democratized access to massive hit status. Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” hit diamond in September 2025, just over a year after release. That’s not because the music industry suddenly opened its doors wider. It’s because the volume of streams now makes hitting 10 million almost inevitable for any song that catches on.
The flip side: a handful of older songs now get their moment in the sun years after release. “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers went diamond in January 2024, more than 20 years after it dropped. “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey followed weeks later. These songs didn’t suddenly become hits. They’d been accumulating streams for decades, slowly marching toward a threshold they were never designed to meet.
What This Means for Business Strategy
Labels are now weaponizing the certification process. The source material notes that artists and labels must actually request certification through an application process, and that can delay updated sales figures. Translation: you could have a diamond-level hit and nobody officially knows it yet because you haven’t filed the paperwork.
That’s a power play. It means certification isn’t just a reflection of success anymore. It’s something you can deploy. You announce it when it matters. You bundle it with an album rollout or a touring announcement. The gap between when a song hits 10 million units and when the RIAA officially recognizes it becomes strategic.
The artists who dominate the diamond list now are the ones with major label backing, substantial streaming presence, and the infrastructure to navigate certification timelines. Independent artists, by contrast, face longer waits or miss certification windows entirely because they lack institutional knowledge of how to work the system.
The Album That Broke the Rule
Katy Perry’s 2010 album “Teenage Dream” now holds a distinction that feels almost absurd: it’s the only album in history with four diamond-certified songs on its tracklist. That’s not a commercial achievement. That’s a streaming achievement. “Firework,” “California Gurls,” “Teenage Dream,” and “E.T” all individually crossed 10 million equivalent units.
The Weeknd’s “Beauty Behind the Madness” has three diamond tracks. Maroon 5 cracked diamond on their third song and joined the likes of Eminem, Ed Sheeran, and Cardi B in a tier that used to feel impossibly distant.
What we’re seeing isn’t just that albums ship more hits anymore. It’s that streaming has made it mathematically possible for mid-tier performers to accumulate diamond certifications that would have been unthinkable under the old physical sales model.
Classics Get Their Due, Eventually
One of the few genuinely heartwarming elements of the 200-song milestone is watching older songs finally get recognized. “Bohemian Rhapsody” went diamond in March 2021. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” took until December 2024. “Livin’ on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi hit diamond in July 2024.
These weren’t failures before streaming. They were defining cultural moments. But they moved fewer units in a physical marketplace because that marketplace was genuinely smaller. Now, decades of streaming plays add up to official recognition. It’s strange to give a 30-year-old song its “first” diamond certification, but it’s also a kind of justice. The music that mattered to people gets vindicated by the platform they now use to listen.
The certification system reflects where we are now: in a streaming monoculture where a song’s success is measured in accumulated plays rather than the moment of its release. That’s not inherently bad. It’s just different. It means the next generation of diamond songs will arrive faster, with less gatekeeping, and with a distribution of winners that tracks closer to actual listening habits than it did 25 years ago.
Whether that’s more democratic or just different is probably the wrong question to ask. What’s clear is that the music industry figured out how to make its most exclusive award much less exclusive, and somehow, that says more about how we listen now than about the songs themselves.
