Nicki Minaj, The Wknd, Big Sean, and a few others artists just got their Monday made.

The Recording Industry Association of America’s chairman Cary Sherman announced Monday morning that the music certification process will change to include audio and video streams.

He said in a statement: “We know that music listening – for both for albums and songs – is skyrocketing, yet that trend has not been reflected in our album certifications.  Modernizing our Album Award to include music streaming is the next logical step in the continued evolution of Gold & Platinum Awards, and doing so enables RIAA to fully reward the success of artists’ albums today.”

Because of the change, seventeen albums have reached new milestones.

Wale’s Ambition has gone Gold, Big Sean’s Dark Sky Paradise and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly have gone platinum, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller and The Weeknd’s Beauty Behind the Madness have gone multi platinum.

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Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, is a body of work that cannot be compared to any other musical piece. Released in 1982, Michael was able to build off his first solo album release, ‘Off The Wall.’ With the excessive help of Quincy Jones, Thriller was made into an immortal hit.

Thriller reigns as the undefeated champion, with over 100 million sales, worldwide. This is the same album that helped Michael earn his 12 Grammy nominations in 1983, bringing home a total of 8.

The album has taken over nearly every market in the world, and helped Michael become the most selling artist of all-time, with over 1 billion total sales, worldwide.

The classic album, is now 30 times multi-platinum, certified by the The Recording Industry Association of America(RIAA).

“It is crystal clear that Michael Jackson is simply the greatest and biggest artist of all time,” LA Reid said. I am extremely proud that Michael is the heart and soul of Epic Records and he will forever remain the one-and-only King of Pop.”

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Chicago’s Chance the Rapper enjoyed considerable amounts of positive feedback and success off his Acid Rap mixtape a few months ago. In fact, he had so much success with it that it charted at number 63 on Billboard with over 1,000 copies sold. The only problem is, there was never any authorization to sell the project.

A company by the name of Mtc confirmed to Billboard that they are indeed selling the mixtape, but refused to confirm whether or not they had permission to do so. Digital versions of the tape were made available through iTunes and Amazon but were quickly pulled down. However, on Amazon’s website, a physical version of Acid Rap is available for purchase at $15 a pop.

“I’ve never heard of Mtc, so this has taken us by surprise,” Chance’s manager Patrick Corcoran says. “But when I first saw it I showed Chance, and his lawyers are trying to stop it.”

Given the fact that Chance is an unsigned artist, his work is not protected by the RIAA and therefore his lawyers are still in the process of working things out. You can read the full piece over at Billboard now.

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The Recording Industry Association of America is a powerful organization. As the primary outlet through which music sales are certified and tracked, it has the power to make or break careers. Yesterday, the RIAA announced that after a year of internally tuning its methodology for tracking music, its gold and platinum rankings will now include streaming services. This update had an immediate impact: over 30 singles were instantly propelled into the upper echelon of music sales, giving the songs some prestige and granting the artists some [more] visibility.

On one hand, this is a positive development that rewards the artists who circumnavigate the traditional outlets for selling and distributing their music by selling it on the internet. For these artists, the internet allows the gap between fan and artist to be dramatically shortened. Rather than forcing purchases to be mediated through a label, then then through a distributor, then through a wholesaler, then through a store and so on, the internet shortens the chain of mediation and strengthens the artist-fan link via hyperlink. How could that be a bad thing?

The issue with this “positive development” is that the internet is now one of the traditional outlets that it was formerly an alternative to. There certainly was a time where fans and artists were more closely interlinked (For some artists and fans, this is still the case), but at the collective level, the industry-wide level, this was a brief moment. As the vibrancy and potency of the internet was gradually realized, all of the mediating chains that existed outside of it were slowly absorbed into it. Labels, stores, wholesalers, distributors and all the other groups and individuals comprising the music industry weren’t out of the loop for very long. And now, after years of being back in the loop, the chain of mediation is just as long as it used to be.

Despite the professed power of the internet, it is clear that the-already-powerful reap the greatest benefit. For instance, even though Spotify is free, alongside all this free music are ads endorsing certain artists. Put more critically, these ads endorse the artists who can afford ads.

What does this all have to do with hip-hop?

Everything. For the artists who can’t afford ads and labels and publicists, i.e., most hip-hop artists, with the exception of Youtube (which has its own limitations), the streams that they use will simply flow into the vast ocean of the internet, probably to be forgotten forever. In other words, none of the artists who use Soundcloud, Datpiff, Bandcamp, Livemixtapes,Vimeo or their own blogs to release their music are counted in the new streaming update unless they also utilize the limited list of streams that the RIAA tracks (Note that many of these streaming services require artists to pay a fee to be hosted).

One could argue that perhaps hip-hop should just branch out and use more diverse sites, but that would just be a response to the RIAA rewarding artists with gold and platinum certifications, not a cause. Plus, other genres with large swaths of broke artists will feel similar effects.

In the end, though the RIAA is not the only organization tracking and publicizing the success of songs, its methods for tracking don’t affect all genres and artists equally, which can have big effects, like last year when Billboard’s change in method put Psy at the top of the rap charts for “Gangnam Style.” For the big hip-hop artists, this update to its methods is awesome, but for the smaller artists who are more vulnerable to the tides of the music industry, the RIAA is doing a grand disservice. As fans of hip-hop, a genre with an abundance of such vulnerable artists, we should celebrate cautiously, if at all.

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