Which artist had the most consecutive gold records?
The first major success that any band can see is getting that first gold record. While the modern age deals with even bigger certifications once the platinum and diamond records start gaining traction, it takes a special kind of group to keep up the track record of going gold one after the other.
Then again, there’s a difference between having consecutive gold records and having the most gold records. I mean, if we were going by the sheer number of classic records, Elvis Presley would have had everyone beat a long time ago. He was used to spitting out records like a damn assembly line when he first started, and judging by how many he actually got to chart, the idea of anyone having 101 gold records in a row feels like fighting a losing battle half the time. But for as many numbers as Presley had, not all of them came one after the other.
Sure, there was bound to be some more nostalgia for ‘The King’ once he got drafted, but there were also a lot of people that saw the tides turning for rock and roll around the same time. Suddenly, Frankie Avalon had become the biggest teen heartthrob, but while his pop tunes did have a nice sound to them, they were never seen with the same sense of danger that Presley had.
And while the British invasion began with The Beatles, they weren’t exactly the dangerous type, either. They were simply a bunch of guys with the kind of boyish charm that any fan could fall in love with, but looking through the band’s discography, the Fab Four had ‘The King’ beat by a mile when looking at the amount of certifications that they have accumulated over the years.
So how did The Beatles earn the most Gold albums?
Because of ‘The King’s track record, The Beatles were always going to have to do something different, but the fact that they had two different markets to work with helped them a little bit. Since the American market had their own views about what their products should sound like, the first half of the band’s career involved them constantly putting together alternate versions of their albums, like With the Beatles shifting into Meet the Beatles in the US.
This may have hurt the band’s initial vision for their records, but that didn’t seem to matter when the public was still eating up everything they threw at them. That meant that across their entire career, there wasn’t a single album that didn’t reach gold status, even some of them going further into Platinum before records like The White Album and Abbey Road earned Diamond status in their later years.
Even from beyond their glory years, the band’s track record still wasn’t broken, with the US release Hey Jude earning Platinum status and their red and blue greatest-hits packages ultimately selling in droves once they were released in 1973. And looking at the RIAA, The Beatles are also among the most decorated rock and roll bands of all time since Meet the Beatles went gold, becoming the most awarded band in history at over 178 million awards since their history.
And despite The Beatles’ lifelong dream being to meet Elvis Presley, it was far from the most comfortable meeting for ‘The King’ when he first saw them. From his perspective, he had practically been dethroned, and the minute that the band performed on the Ed Sullivan Show, the next few years involved everyone trading in the slicked-back hairdos for moptops.
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