Recording Industry Association of America

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a Washington, D.C.–based trade organization that represents major American music companies and record labels (including producers, manufacturers, and distributors of audio recordings). Membership is not open to individuals. The RIAA’s mission is to protect its constituents’ intellectual property, to conduct industry and technical research, and to monitor federal and state laws regarding music and intellectual property.

The RIAA is a key figure in lobbying the U.S. Congress and other lawmakers to strengthen copyright protections and to protect the First Amendment right to free speech of its members. It also fights illegal copying/digital piracy and other issues in court on behalf of its members. The RIAA also honors record companies and artists with certification awards in recognition of sales achievements and helps to establish the Parental Advisory Label (or PAL) program. RIAA members account for at least 85–90% of the music legally sold in the United States. This entry discusses the RIAA’s role in certifying sales of recorded music and administering the PAL program. It also explores the RIAA’s advocacy on behalf of the recording industry and controversial court cases involving the RIAA.

History

Originally called the Record Industry Association of America, the RIAA was formed in 1952. The early work of the association included establishing and monitoring of industry standards for phonographic records, and later, magnetic tape. One of the most important among these standards was RIAA’s equalization curve, developed in 1954, which standardized the width of the grooves used in records and established specifications for the frequency response of audio recordings (known as the RIAA Curve). The RIAA conferred its first Gold Award to Perry Como in March 1958 for his single “Catch A Falling Star.” In July of that same year, the original soundtrack album of the 1955 film Oklahoma! was awarded the first Gold Album Award.

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In the 1960s, the RIAA shifted much of its focus from industry standards toward illegal record copying and piracy due in part to the rise in popularity of 8-track tapes. In 1970, the organization changed its name to the Recording Industry Association of America. In 1972, the RIAA successfully lobbied Congress to have copyright protections extended to the owners of sound recordings. In the early 1980s, the RIAA worked with the Motion Picture Association of America to convince Congress to establish harsher punishments for the piracy of films and audio recordings.

In 1985, the RIAA succumbed to pressure from parental watchdog groups such as the Parents Music Resource Center (led by Tipper Gore), agreeing to establish a program to label records that feature obscene or offensive content and to list record lyrics on the record sleeve. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the RIAA established additional technical standards to prevent illegal copying and digital piracy, including the addition of the International Standard Recording Code (which assigns each recording a unique number), the Global Release Identifier (a code that identifies the source of digital copies of music), and the Watermark Payload Program (yet another code that identifies the owner of the copyright, the distribution channel, and any parental advisory associated with a recording).

The RIAA also established the Digital Data Exchange, which sets standards for the distribution of digital music. Throughout the 2000s, the RIAA has been involved in several high-profile court cases involving digital music piracy and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. Recently, the RIAA has taken an interest in negotiating with streaming companies such as Spotify and Pandora for fair compensation and royalties for its members.

Sales Certification

The RIAA is perhaps best known for its sales certification program. Long before the founding of the RIAA, awarding gold and silver record awards for hitting sales benchmarks was already a tradition among individual record companies to publicize their own success. In order to be certified for an award, a record company must request sales certification from the RIAA, at which time an audit will commence. Only product sales and on-demand streams that are actually distributed in the United States are counted toward certification. Upon certification, the RIAA honors single tracks, short form albums/extended plays, full-length albums, and multidisc sets selling the following number of units:

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• Gold (established in 1958): 500,000 units
• Platinum (established in 1978): 1 million units
• Multiplatinum (established in 1984): 2 million units for initial award (and for every increment of 1 million thereafter)
• Diamond (established in 1999): 10 million units

For this awards program, the RIAA counts each permanent album or physical album sale as 1 unit but also considers 10 permanent track downloads from an album or 1,500 on-demand audio and/or video streams from an album as 1 unit for certification purposes. The RIAA also recognizes music video singles, long form music videos, multibox music video sets, and ringtones, although the unit sales threshold for these formats varies and is usually lower than those listed previously.

The RIAA also honors entire albums and single tracks from albums that are more than 50% Spanish language with certification awards in their Premios de Oro y Platino program when they meet the following sales benchmarks:

• Oro (established in 2001): 30,000 units
• Platino (established in 2001): 60,000 units
• Multiplatino (established in 2001): 120,000 units for initial award (and for every increment of 60,000 thereafter)
• Diamante (established in 2001): 600,000 units
• Latin Digital Single Award (established in 2013): 30,000+ of single sales and on-demand stream units

This program counts single album and song sales as one unit and 1,500 on-demand audio and/or video song streams as 10 track sales or one album sale.

As the recording industry shifted its focus from analog recordings to digital formats, the RIAA also adapted its certification program to include digital downloads beginning in 2004. The same unit number benchmarks used for analog records and singles also apply equally for the Digital Single Awards, with each permanent digital download counted as one unit for certification purposes. In 2006, the RIAA also certified songs downloaded as ringtones and began accounting for streaming audio and/or video, with 150 on-demand streams counting as one unit for certification purposes.

PAL Program

Together with its member companies, the National Parent Teacher Association and the Parents Music Resource Center, the RIAA created the PAL program in 1985. The program was designed to alert consumers to those albums that contain strong language and/or depictions of violence, sex, or substance abuse. Participation in the program is voluntary and is administered by RIAA, which owns the trademark for the “Parental Advisory Explicit Content” labels (known as the PAL Mark) used on recordings.

Work Made for Hire

While working on the unrelated Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999, a congressional staff attorney inserted language into the bill that changed the copyright code of the United States as it applied to sound recordings. By adding the words as a sound recording to the legislation, Congress changed the nature of the work-for-hire portion of the U.S. copyright code. This effectively revoked the rights of artists to reclaim their copyright for works after 35 years have passed since the rights were first granted to the record label that recorded their work. Since this revision greatly benefited record companies, the RIAA defended the change. This policy was ultimately repealed due to successful lobbying of Congress by the Recording Artists’ Coalition, a trade organization that represents recording artists.

RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc.

In October 1998, the RIAA attempted to prevent Diamond Multimedia from selling its newly released Rio series of MP3 players (the first commercially successful MP3 players in the United States), claiming that transferring audio from CDs for upload to the players as MP3 files violated the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act since the players were not digital audio recording devices. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court ruled that the RIAA had no claim since noncommercial transfer of recordings from one personal device to another constitutes space shifting, not the creation of altogether new recordings.

RIAA v. Napster

When Napster, a P2P file-sharing system, was released in the fall of 1999, it allowed its 13.6 million users to share and download millions of digital copies of music directly from the computers of other users. The RIAA took Napster to court arguing that these downloads were illegal and constituted digital piracy, and a federal judge issued an injunction against Napster in 2000. In 2001, Napster’s servers were completely shut down by the 9th Circuit Court.

In Napster’s absence, distributed P2P networks became much more popular. Because distributed P2P networks have no central server, they are much harder to shut down, so RIAA decided to sue hundreds of individual users of P2P software, beginning in late 2003. The RIAA would eventually file over 30,000 lawsuits against alleged copyright infringers; some would settle out of court for around $2,500; others would fight the charges, leading to bad press for the RIAA as the public viewed the lawsuit as an attempt by major record labels to punish minor offenders with excessive fines in lengthy court cases. Abandoning this strategy in 2008, the RIAA launched their six strikes initiative, or Copyright Alert System, in which they convinced the five largest Internet service providers to send warnings to users involved in illegal file sharing. Although it reduced the likelihood of users continuing to share music illegally, the Copyright Alert System was abandoned in early 2017.

The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.