Tyler Childers Posts Gold ‘Purgatory’ Edition, Sells Out in 1 Hour

As Saving Country Music has been chronicling here in 2020, Tyler Childers has been on one hell of a tear in the sales department, and specifically his 2017 breakout album Purgatory. The song “Feathered Indians” was the first independently-released single in country music to be Certified Gold in the modern era for hitting 500,000 in sales and streaming equivalents when it broke the mark in February.

Then in September, “Feathered Indians” was Certified Platinum for sales of over 1 million. And then on November 10th, the Tyler Childers singles “Lady May” and “Whitehouse Road” were also Certified Gold. Purgatory by Tyler Childers will now go down in history as the record that shattered the glass ceiling for country artists not supported by mainstream country radio.

To commemorate the achievement, Tyler Childers listed for sale a commemorative edition of Purgatory stamped in 180-gram gold vinyl on Monday (11-30), with a metallic Certified Gold sticker on the jacket. However, proving his commercial mite once again, within an hour of posting the commemorative record bundled with a T-shirt, it was already sold out.

No word yet if more copies will be added in the future. With COVID-19 and the vinyl record shortage, copies of certain titles have been hard to come by. Officially, the Purgatory album itself has yet to be Certified Gold by the RIAA, but Saving Country Music is being told it’s just a formality, and it will happen very soon.

No longer are Gold and Platinum records only the domain of the mainstream, and we can expect more songs, albums, and artists to hit that status in the coming months and years. Along with Tyler Childers being the first to break the barrier, Cody Jinks has Gold records for his single “Hippies & Cowboys” off his 2010 album Less Wise, and Cody’s song “Loud and Heavy” now has a Platinum certification. Southern rock band Whiskey Myers also received Gold certifications for their songs “Ballad of a Southern Man” and “Stone” this year.

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