An Artist receives a gold record in the US for 500,000 copies of an album sold, 500,000 singles, or 50,000 in music videos. In the UK the gold record standard is 100,000 in album, 400,000 in single, or 25,000 in music videos.
Fun Fact 2018, marks the 60ths Anniversary of the Gold & Platinum Records.
https://www.riaa.com/goldandplatinum60/
In the late summer of 1977, NASA launched twin spacecrafts—Voyager 1 and Voyager 2—as part of a mission to better understand Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer solar system. As a bonus: Each probe carried a gold-plated copper phonograph that contained sounds and images from Earth.
The idea was to send something into the universe that demonstrated humanity’s wish to join a “community of galactic civilizations,” as President Jimmy Carter put it at the time, and to express good will to intelligent life elsewhere. It was also meant as a cosmic postcard, of sorts, a way of sharing the experience of living on Earth with intelligent life elsewhere.
The record, curated by a team led by the astrophysicist Carl Sagan, featured the music of Beethoven, Chuck Berry, Kesarbai Kerkar, and Blind Willie Johnson, and various folk music from around the world. Images, placed electronically on the phonograph, included photographs of a mother nursing her baby; a woman with a microscope; an astronaut in space; highway traffic in Ithaca, New York; the pages of an open book; a violin with sheet music; men laying bricks to build a house in Africa; a woman eating grapes at a supermarket; and a number of diagrams and illustrations of concepts like continental drift and vertebrate evolution.
There were also audio clips depicting scenes of life on Earth—the sounds of rushing wind and the roar of ocean tides, whale songs, elephants trumpeting, human footsteps and human laughter.
Weight: 0.93 GM
Metal: 14K Yellow Gold
Length: 21 mm (0.82 inches)
Width: 15 mm (0.59 inches)
Feature: Stamp
Feature: Solid
Feature: Polish
Feature: Etching Capable
