The summer awaits Future, who has been hard at work with Chance The Rapper, DJ Khaled, Jay Z and more in recent months, likely making sure that his year-plus streak of wins doesn’t cease. You can feel him laying in wait like a cheetah ready to pounce. His Snapchat account has the energy of somebody who’s about to kill it.
Before all that gets started, however, he’s got a considerable achievement to celebrate. The RIAA announced today that Future’s third solo LP, DS2, has been certified platinum. It’s the first platinum album of Future’s career, who turned up the heat a couple years ago and has delivered four albums and several mixtapes since 2014. DS2, the highly-anticipated follow-up to the Atlanta rapper’s breakthrough mixtape, Dirty Sprite, debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 in July 2015, moving 147,000 units in its first week. The set spawned several hits, including “Where Ya At” featuring Drake, “Commas” and “Trap N****s,” and helped usher in Metro Boomin as one of rap’s most essential producers.
Earlier this year, the RIAA unveiled a new set of certification rules and guidelines, anchored by a new formula that deducts “equivalent album units” from a weighted combination of traditional album sales (when someone purchases the album in-person or online), and streaming units. The “equivalent album units” figure would be your “sales” for the week, which are the numbers reported by Billboard and HitsDailyDouble.
Under that update to the rulebook, several prominent artists have been awarded new or updated plaques, including Big Sean (Dark Sky Paradise), The Weeknd (Beauty Behind the Madness), Kendrick Lamar (To Pimp a Butterfly) and Bryson Tiller (TrapSoul).