Rolling Stone Magazine (issue 256)
January 12, 1978
By Dave Marsh

There is nothing mysterious about Fleetwood Mac sweeping Rolling Stone’s 1977 Readers’ Poll. Rumours, the album that topped the charts for six months, has sold almost 8 million copies and still sells over 200,000 copies weekly. Released in February, Rumours sold enough copies at its peak to go gold twice a month, platinum every thirty days. (They’ve also got a platinum eight-track and gold cassette.) Four of the album’s eleven songs have become hit singles: “Go Your Own Way,” “Dreams,” “Don’t Stop” and most recently, “You Make Loving Fun.” Over in Burbank, the biggest problem the band has created for its record company, Warner Bros., is deciding whether to release a fifth single. Should it be “The Chain” or “Second Hand News,” or should they forget about it altogether to avoid saturating the market?

Multimillion monsters have become commonplace in the record business. Consider the history of the gold and platinum awards the industry (through the Recording Industry Association of America) makes for LPs that move heavy tonnage. Prior to 1969, only gold records (for $1 million in sales, about 450,000 copies) were awarded. That year, Atlantic gave Cream’s Wheels of Fire the first unofficial platinum record (for sales of one million units or more). Unsanctioned platinum awards appeared sporadically for the next several years despite RIAA protests. But in 1975 the RIAA raised the gold standard to 500,000 units to compensate for increases in wholesale record prices, and because of the increasingly large market was forced to officially sanction platinum. Platinum has replaced gold as confirmation of star status, and record companies advertise LPs as double, triple and soon (who knows?) octuple platinum.