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Riot Games celebrates K/DA's first gold record for POP/STARS song

Not bad for an imaginary pop group.

Ozzie Mejia

July 30, 2021 4:50 PM

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Riot Games has been making beautiful music with its virtual pop group, K/DA, for a while, but on Friday, the band received a very real accolade. After nearly three years, the group's popular single POP/STARS received gold certification from the Recording Industry Association of America.

💎👑🎤🧬 GOES GOLD.

Congratulations to @KDA_MUSIC on their Gold Record for #POPSTARS!

Stream POP/STARS to celebrate💿
↳ https://t.co/qAmI1mk54F pic.twitter.com/HceQiq4Sdf

— Riot Games Music (@riotgamesmusic) July 30, 2021

What does it mean to get a Gold Record? By today's standards, it means receiving 500,000 unique downloads. That's permanent downloads, so it's not quite the same as streaming numbers. Although 150 on-demand audio or video streams will be counted as a single unit. For POP/STARS, that's no mean feat and is more impressive considering the music video currently has over 452 million views on YouTube. That's not bad for any music group, much less a virtual one that only made its debut at the 2018 League of Legends World Championships.

POP/STARS originally released in 2018, shortly after K/DA's creation. Riot Games put the virtual pop group together within League of Legends. K/DA is made up of characters Akali, Ahri, Kai'Sa, and EvelynnK. Late last year, K/DA released ALL OUT, an EP featuring a handful of the group's tracks.

There's no shortage of places to listen to POP/STARS, so choose your streaming service if you want to inflate those numbers a little more. For more on the League of Legends virtual pop group, visit the K/DA topic page and keep it on Shacknews for the latest.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?