I have never owned a platinum record, a gold record, even a copper one. So I can’t test this myself.
But I heard an excellent rumor on a popular podcast and I can’t stop thinking about how we’ve been misled for decades about gold and platinum records.
The guy who revealed this fact to me was Ad-Rock, on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, an occasional play for me at best, and one I clicked on because I hadn’t heard much from the surviving Beastie Boys since Adam Yauch died a dozen years ago. It was worth it—they didn’t dwell much on the sad way their group ended. But they did have some funny things to say to Conan.
The key one (regaled in the clip above): Apparently, Ad-Rock noticed that the gold record they received for Paul’s Boutique, an album that quite famously sampled a lot of records, had a track count that did not match the number of grooves on the record. Curious, the trio pulled the record off the wall, took it out of the glass case, and uncovered something shocking.
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“I was looking at it, and I could see it has our label and I could see that it has you whatever like nine songs on the one side,” he recalled. “And I was looking at the actual gold record—it only had four songs on it.”
That was a bit of a mind blow for the trio, which immediately broke the glass, took the record out of its shell, and heard … instrumental piano recordings of Barry Manilow songs. This clearly blew the minds of both the band as well as the hosts. It’s not exactly common knowledge, but apparently the gold and platinum records are just plated and labeled with no care as to whether the actual records contain the artist’s songs.
Now, it turns out, Ad-Rock is not the first person to report that certified records appear to just be plated copies of whatever junked seconds they have lying around at the record plant. Evidence of this fact goes as far back as the 1960s, when John Densmore of The Doors did the same thing, as he wrote in his 1990 autobiography Riders on the Storm:
After getting a hammer from the kitchen, I took the gold record outside to the trash cans. I leaned the frame over one of the cans and tapped hard on the glass. It broke and I carefully pulled out the record, making sure there wasn’t any broken glass stuck to it. I brought it back inside to the turntable.
“This thing is really flimsy! It isn’t a real record … some kind of pressing. … I wonder if it will play?” I put the needle down on the first cut, and through lots of audio crackling we could hear a large orchestra with someone reciting poetry.
“It’s Rod McKuen! It’s fucking Rod McKuen!”
“That’s funny.” Julia laughed. “Why do you think they did it?”
I laughed uproariously, yet at the same time I felt insulted. “I don’t believe it. They’re too cheap to spend five or six bucks on the real thing. So they just get an old $1.98 Thrifty Drug Store discount bin record and schlock it with fake gold, stick a new label on it and slam it into a frame! God damn.”
Another myth shattered.
And yes, there were other people who figured this out. In the mid-2000s, after Jason Mraz got his first gold record, he did the exact same thing on camera in a pre-YouTube video:
“Surprisingly, but not to our surprise, under the Mraz label was indeed another label,” Mraz recalled in a faux-newscaster style as he explained that there was in fact a record by a contemporary jazz artist, Tom Scott, on the gold record.
Other artists have reported the same—Micah Schweinsberg, the current drummer for the country band Diamond Rio, reported the same fact about a record by contemporary Christian artist Jaci Velasquez, which had rap music on it.
While somewhat of an unknown thing, this information has been floating around long enough that it was central to the plot of a 2012 episode of the Disney show Big Time Rush (a fact pointed out to me by Sarah Tuttle on Bluesky).
I emailed the RIAA’s media person to see if they would confirm this fact for me—which I gotta admit, I found hilarious—but haven’t heard back just yet. Hopefully they can confirm exactly why they do this. But let it be known that gold records are not in fact the actual records of the artists who receive them, a detail that has been reported by multiple artists in multiple genres.
Golden Links
Connecting 444 consoles to a single television set is one of those feats nobody needed to do, but at the same time, someone needed to do it.
Shoutout to Christopher Owens, the singing half of the great late-2000s band Girls, who just re-emerged after nearly a decade of silence. This track, “No Good,” is good enough that he may just get a gold record from it.
It’s far past time for David Zaslav to be relegated to the dustbin of history along with all the content he callously deleted.
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