Chris Brown, The Weeknd, and Usher are easily the three most successful Black male singer singles artists of the century.
While Chris sits in the record books of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for being the first male vocalist overall to have 20 multi-Platinum singles, The Weeknd (born Abel Tesfaye) was the first Black male singer to sell over 100 million singles in the U.S. and have 5 Diamond-certified hits.
Recently, Usher became the first Black male to own a Diamond-certified single and album that was released this century.
As if that wasn’t enough to celebrate, he’s joined Brown and Tesfaye in an exclusive RIAA club.
Taking to press earlier this month (as we reported here), the RIAA announced over 30 updates to the certification statuses of some of Ush’s biggest hits.
While the biggest callouts were the Diamond certification of his 2004 smash ‘Yeah‘ and new set of multi-Platinum albums (2010’s ‘Raymond vs. Raymond’ and 2008’s ‘Here I Stand’), another noteworthy mention came courtesy of the number of songs he had elevated to multi-Platinum status.
For context, tunes that reach 2x Platinum or more (meaning they’ve sold the equivalence of at least 2 million in the United States) are deemed “multi-Platinum.”
Among his string of new certifications, songs ‘There Goes My Baby,’ No Limit,’ ‘U Remind Me,’ ‘Hey Daddy,’ and ‘Climax’ were just a few that were lifted to or beyond the 2x Platinum threshold.
Together, the new additions not only bring the 8x GRAMMY winner’s cumulative singles sales to 83.5 million in the United States but also lift his multi-Platinum single count to 16.
The only other male vocalists to have earned as many or more single certifications of that ilk are Brown (20), Justin Bieber (20), Morgan Wallen (18), Luke Bryan (17), Luke Combs (16), and Tesfaye (16).