Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ LP Finally Goes Platinum in Britain
The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — along with 12 other Fab Four albums, plus records by a slew of artists from Bob Dylan to Marvin Gaye — will finally be certified platinum in the United Kingdom following a change in the way the British Phonographic Industry allots such distinctions, The Guardian reports.
In the past, the BPI would only give out silver, gold and platinum sales awards to record labels that specifically requested them, but now they’ll be doled out automatically once an album passes the right sales threshold in the U.K. (60,000, 100,000 and 300,000 copies, respectively).
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While the long overdue recognition will be nice, the BPI’s new certificates will actually only be distributed based on album sales since 1994. So while Sgt. Pepper has likely moved about 5.1 million copies in the U.K. since its 1967 release, it won’t be certified 17-times platinum, but rather triple-platinum for the approximately 900,000 copies its sold since 1994.
The Beatles, and Paul McCartney himself, will have the chance to test out the new system with their respective releases slated for this fall: A new collection of previously unreleased recordings from The Beatles’ BBC radio sessions in the mid-60s will be released this November, while McCartney’s latest solo effort, New, will be out October 15th.