JAY-Z has racked up his third diamond plaque, this time achieving the feat with his Alicia Keys collab “Empire State of Mind.”
The RIAA announced the news on Wednesday (July 24), celebrating the song reaching the equivalent of 10 million sales in the U.S.
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The honor marks Keys’ first diamond plaque, and Hova’s third, following receiving ones last year for his Kanye West collaboration “N-ggas In Paris” and the Rihanna duet “Umbrella.”
“N-ggas In Paris” had been stuck on 9x-platinum since May 2022 but crossed over the elusive diamond mark in 2023, more than a decade after its initial 2011 release.
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“Empire State of Mind” was first released in 2009 and appears on JAY’s The Blueprint 3 album.
Congratulations @sc@aliciakeys on this truly well deserved RIAA Diamond certification for #EmpireStateOfMind 💎🗽 @RocNationhttps://t.co/zwKDlCwV04
— RIAA (@RIAA) July 24, 2024
This isn’t the first high watermark Alicia and Hova have accomplished together.
Last month, the “If I Ain’t Got You” singer took to Instagram to celebrate the song hitting one billion streams and shared a black and white clip of her and JAY-Z standing in front of bright lights before epic orchestral music crescendoed.
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Keys captioned her post: “1 Dream. 1 Song. 1 Billion streams [three prayer hand emojis]. Thank you! We love you. What’s next….[eyes emoji, shushing emoji].”
She later took to X (formerly Twitter), where she shared a photo of two performance microphones — one with the initial “J,” the other labeled “AK.”
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While she left the photo uncaptioned, she tagged CBS and Roc Nation, indicating that a surprise televised special may be in the works. That turned out to be a pre-taped performance that aired during the 2024 Tony Awards.
Keys began by performing with the cast of musical Hell’s Kitchen, which is a semi-autobiographical show about the singer’s life growing up in Manhattan in the 1990s.
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The “No One” singer was performing her solo version of “Empire State of Mind” when she took off into the audience, with the camera surprisingly cutting to the rap legend as he performed a verse from the track.
Despite the song’s success, it didn’t change everyone’s life for the better.
Back in March, Lil Mama opened up about her infamous crashing of the duo’s VMAs performance back in 2009. She made it clear that the fallout afterwards left her “hurt.”
That’s the confession she made during an interview on The Jay Hill Network, wherein she also revealed that the subsequent backlash took a serious toll on her mental health.
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“Yeah, in the beginning, I was hurt,” she began. “Tyrese called my phone as soon as I got home. He was like, ‘Bro, you didn’t tell me you was performing!’ First of all, my heart is racing. I’m already mad embarrassed.
“I had to deal with Ed Lover on the radio in the morning, Wendy Williams, Angie Martinez, who talked to JAY, and he was just like, ‘Yeah, you know. I didn’t like it.’ He was so angry, and I was just trying my best to do everything I could do. After a while, I was like, ‘Forgive yourself, bro. Move forward.’”
