Sting’s album was certified gold but I can’t find any real sales numbers for it, which probably means it’s the same story as McCreery’s.

Sting sold 521K in 2009:

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100106007077&newsLang=en

Swift’s and Groban’s Christmas albums had been out for a couple of years by the time the 2009 season rolled around, so those were still good numbers for their CDs in 2009. There were two artists on that list that did sell gold or better. In the past few years, two or three new Christmas offerings every season seem to be able to hit the gold (or higher) mark.

‘Well, I’m not going to say it will “hurt”, but certifying it this early might “help”.

People are lemmings. When they hear a song/album/whatever has sold
gold or platinum, some of them will say “Oh, I should check that out.
Others like it, so might I”.’

Good point.

I guess you only end up looking bad if it the ploy *doesn’t* work as promotion. … Cause then people will call you Taylor Hicks. heh.   If I were somebody with greater sales who didn’t get thus certified, though, I think I’d be pretty annoyed. So I’m not sure that it’s an *entirely* victimless pr snow job. ….

” If I were somebody with greater sales who didn’t get thus certified,
though, I think I’d be pretty annoyed. So I’m not sure that it’s an
*entirely* victimless pr snow job. …. ”

I agree, especially with your latter point. I think that these RIAA certifications should be “automatic” and not have to rely on the label to apply for them. It appears that some artists receive their certifications as soon as possible, whereas others have sold far more than platinum, and still haven’t received official certifications. In that case, it can be harmful to those artists who have achieved the certification levels in actual sales, but don’t have the “official” designations. Since these certifications are often used in articles/biographies as a measure of commercial success for an artist (and the implied popularity), not receiving certifications can be misleading and lead to an underestimation of an artist’s commercial success.

If I were in an industry that is desperately trying to tailor
legislation so that my labels and artists don’t see further cuts in
royalty payments, I’d be doing my level best to appear as an honest
broker, not a carnival huckster.

Clearly, I am much more cynical about companies than the average bear.

In my opinion, the biggest liars with the biggest pockets often get their legislated way first. Banks who totally screwed over their customers got the biggest bailouts in US history, their executives get massive bonuses while driving their companies into the ground and I haven’t seen any major legislative reform that will prevent it all from happening again.  There are lots of bigger fish for the legislators to fry if they want to go over the dishonest brokers. How about those execs who got safety bonuses after their oil rig blew up, killed 11 workers and polluted the entire Gulf of Mexico? I wonder what they would have had to do to not get their safety bonuses.

I seriously think muddying the waters between shipping and sold is a very minor issue in comparison.  It is a debate to rage in the bubble of those who are interested in album numbers and sometimes cage some (often copyright infringing) numbers. I’ve spent too many years explaining this issue to people who are pretty far into the numbers bubble because they don’t even know about the issue (or care to remember it from year to year) to think that this resonates with the general public and is causing them to reject higher royalty payments to artists.

Updated official sales #s:   

21 MCCREERY*SCOTTY CHRISTMAS WITH SCOTTY 49,581 111 23,476 167,618