50 Cent's 'Get Rich or Die Tryin'' certified 5x Platinum within four months

Why it matters

June 26, 2003. The RIAA certified Get Rich or Die Tryin' five-times platinum, five million US units, four months after release. The certification confirmed what the first-week sales had already indicated: 50 Cent at this point was the biggest new rap artist in the country and possibly in the world. The scale of the achievement is worth pausing on. The album-sales business was already starting to collapse in 2003 under the pressure of early digital piracy. Most new rap acts were no longer hitting platinum at all, let alone five times in four months. 50 Cent doing it in that environment, with a debut LP, proved a few things at once: that the Shady/Aftermath signing of him had been worth what Em and Dre paid for it, that the mixtape pipeline was a real way to test artists before major-label commitment, that 50's biographical mythology (the nine bullets, the survival, the Jam Master Jay mentorship) was commercial in a way mythology had not always been. You can argue 50 Cent's catalog has aged unevenly. You cannot argue with what he did in 2003.