Rihanna, the world's youngest Black billionaire, hits 200 million RIAA singles certifications

Rihanna has not released an album since 2016. She just set a record that active artists spend entire careers chasing.

The Barbadian singer and entrepreneur has become the first woman in the history of the Recording Industry Association of America to surpass 200 million singles certifications. Her total now stands at 200.5 million units, placing her third on the RIAA's all-time list behind Drake, who leads with 277.5 million, and Morgan Wallen at 215 million.

The milestone lands without a single new studio album to drive it. Rihanna's output since ANTI, released in January 2016, amounts to two soundtrack contributions: "Lift Me Up," recorded for the 2022 film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and "Friends of Mine," which appeared in the 2025 animated film Smurfs. Everything else on the tally is catalog -- "Umbrella," "We Found Love," "Only Girl (In the World)," "Don't Stop the Music" -- songs still racking up streams a decade and more after their release.

The RIAA counts 150 on-demand audio or video streams as the equivalent of one certified digital single. That methodology has put streaming-era artists at the top of the all-time list, which is why Drake and Wallen lead while artists like Michael Jackson and Queen sit far lower despite their towering cultural weight. Rihanna, who straddled the pre-streaming and streaming eras, benefits from both sides of that math.

Last December, Billboard announced that ANTI had spent 500 weeks on the Billboard 200, making Rihanna the first Black woman in history to achieve that mark. The RIAA milestone now stacks on top of it.

She has been talking about a ninth album for years. In a 2025 interview with Harper's Bazaar, she said the wait came down to creative refusal. "Every time, I was just like, 'No, it's not me. It's not right. It's not matching my growth,'" she said. She added that a decade's silence has raised the stakes considerably. "This much time away from music needs to count for the next thing everyone hears. It has to matter. I have to show them the worth in the wait."

The new music, she said, would not be built for radio. It would not be commercial in the conventional sense. What it would be, she has left deliberately vague.

Outside of music, Rihanna became in 2025 the first Black woman to found two billion-dollar companies, with both Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty each surpassing $1 billion in valuation. The two businesses together are valued at more than $3 billion. Fenty Beauty, launched in 2017 with 40 foundation shades that exposed a gap the beauty industry had long ignored, has since expanded its footprint to include Guyana, its latest market entry in the Caribbean.

The RIAA record is hers alone now. If the album ever arrives, she may not hold it for long.