As elsewhere, falling sales of music impacts on golden album awards
Only a few years ago, musicians needed to sell 100,000 copies to secure a
golden album award. This number was then lowered to 50,000 and only a few
days ago was further decreased to 35,000. A similar story applies to secure
a platinum album, which required 200,000 thousand copies to be sold, which
was dropped to 100,000, and now stands at 70,000. The Association of
Audio-Video Producers (ZPAV) would not reveal who came up with the idea of
lowering these benchmarks. ZPAV chief Marek Staszewski claims that a major
factor which influenced the decision is the falling number of record sales.
He added that lower demand for albums had also hit the biggest music markets
of the USA and Germany. Like Poland, Czech, Hungarian and Swedish publishers
have also decided to decrease the number of records sold needed to qualify
for a golden album. (Rzeczpospolita, p. A9) M.M.
