Short answers, pulled from the story.
The RIAA was founded in 1952. Its original mission covered administering recording copyright fees, working with trade unions, and researching the record industry and government regulations.
A Gold album requires 500,000 units sold; a Platinum album requires one million units. The Diamond award, introduced in 1999, requires ten million units for either an album or a single. Since 2013, streaming counts toward certification, with 1,500 on-demand audio or video streams equaling one unit at the album level.
Between 2001 and 2020, the RIAA spent between $2.4 million and $6.5 million annually on lobbying. In 2025, the organization spent more than $2.5 million in the first quarter alone, largely in response to artificial intelligence.
The RIAA sued more than 20,000 people in the United States for allegedly distributing copyrighted music without authorization. It identified defendants through ISP records linking IP addresses to subscriber accounts, then offered settlements typically requiring a payment and a pledge to stop file sharing. In late 2008, the RIAA announced it would stop filing individual lawsuits and instead seek ISP cooperation on a three-strike system.
Mitch Glazier became the RIAA's chairman and CEO in 2019, having joined the organization around 20 years earlier. In 1999, while working as a congressional staff attorney, he inserted language into copyright legislation that classified many music recordings as works made for hire, shifting copyright interests from artists to record labels. He was hired by the RIAA shortly after that change came to light.
On the 23rd of October 2020, the RIAA sent a DMCA takedown request to GitHub targeting the open-source project youtube-dl and its forks, citing Title 17 U.S.C. Section 1201. Critics argued the software was used by archivists to preserve videos documenting social injustice, and Parker Higgins of the Electronic Frontier Foundation called the action a throwback to the DeCSS controversy.