Yeah, really impressive research!
We salute you @B S Magnet.
If this is what you're capable of whilst procrastinating then I can't fathom what you'd achieve when you're fully focused...
Well, that’s the unanswered, $1,000,000 question, isn’t it? [me, mostly querying myself, both rhetorically and aloud, in a muted expression of futility…] :/
I thought that it might be Alicia Myers from the image - as she was also on MCA and attained triple platinum certification. Jody Whatley is awesome - solo and during her Shalamar phase.
I look fondly on her and Chaka Khan especially as having been able to be hit-makers under their own names in the post-disco-boogie years after Rufus and Shalamar. Then again, Shalamar came a bit later and bridged a bit beyond that period.
But going back last night to check my work: the platinum frame featured only vinyl and cassette. That puts it exactly in the right time span. I can’t say what year exactly cassettes began being gilded and added to frames, but it happened sometime after the early 1980s, as most gold and platinum records I’ve seen on walls or at record shows from before then feature usually (and only) vinyl — literally, a “record” in American parlance.
CDs began to appear on those RIAA certification frames around 1988 or 1989 (I want to say the latter), once the format moved past novelty-experiment and sales for those began to overtake vinyl in the U.S. (which seemed to happen a lot more quickly than in Europe — though whereas the U.S. CD market was about pumping mass quantities of big artists, in Europe and Japan many more experimental albums and singles from independent labels made their way onto CD when their U.S. label counterparts wouldn’t bother with anything more than vinyl and cassette).
In the U.S., at least, it had become rarer and rarer by 1989 for new albums to get the tri-format treatment. By 1990, it was a dwindling minority, and by 1991, only the biggest artists on their major releases would get a brief vinyl pressing (I remember us getting, like, 60 On Every Street CDs and probably 40 cassettes by Dire Straits delivered to us on street date, but one copy of it on vinyl… which I bought). By 1992, virtually nothing in the U.S., album-wise was released on vinyl, no matter the label. It was ridiculous.
Through the end of 1987, major label releases were still often vinyl and cassette only. As early as the end of 1988, the same labels were beginning to withhold releasing vinyl on the minor new releases.
Because I’ve never really seen many RIAA frames after about 1992, I’ve always wondered whether certification for certain WEA albums from around 1993 or 1994 also featured a gilded minidisc. 🤔 (Don’t get me going on the UPC format-suffix-digit convention used through the early/mid-aughts — I actually like talking about that goofy stuff to audiences of no one.)
Images taken from episode 3 of the BBC documentary series Archaeology: A Secret History. Mark Thomas presents archaeologist Richard Miles with the results of his DNA ancestry test using what appears to be a 15" unibody MBP.
I can spot eBay, Wikipedia and Facebook amongst the entries in his favourites bar.
I can spot Firefox or some Mozilla browser!
What year was this? The browser and the traffic buttons seem to hint at 2010/2011ish and on Snow Leopard. So too does the hints of Office 2011 icons in the Dock and that era of Acrobat Reader.
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