The Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) is an industry trade group composed of Japanese corporations involved in the music industry.
It was founded in 1942 as the Japan Phonogram Record Cultural Association, and adopted its current name in 1969.
In 1989, the Recording Industry Association of Japan introduced the music recording certification systems.
It is awarded based on shipment figures of compact disc or cassette tape which was reported by record labels.
The RIAJ Digital Track chart (RIAJ有 料音楽配信チャート) is a chart, that ranks the best selling digital singles in Japan, based on chaku-uta full downloads.
It began in April 2009. Prior to this (August 2006-March 2009) the RIAJ released a monthly chaku-uta chart, but this has been discontinued.
The RIAJ has been digitally certifying songs since August 2006, though certified the backlog of songs released prior to this.
RIAJ counts most online plattforms for digital downloads. Biggest plattform is iTunes now, followed by recochoku, which was the biggest before (
http://recochoku.jp/).
In January 2014 they updated their certification system and merged PC Download and Chaku Uta Full together in one category named Single Track now (means they don't make a difference anymore if you download with a PC e.g. with iTunes or with a mobile phone with e.g. Recochoku like before).
There's the weekly cellphone download chart by RIAJ here, which was stopped in 2012:
http://www.riaj.or.jp/data/others/we...art/index.html .
And here's the monthly chart with all certifications: http://www.riaj.or.jp/data/others/chart/index.html .
It's updated around the 20th of each month.
This is where all certifications are listed and where I took my information from to make those lists following in this thread.
What are the certification thresholds?
There are five main ones:
Gold (ゴールド) (100,000),
Platinum (プラチナ) (250,000),
Double Platinum (ダブル・プラチナ) (500,000),
Triple Platinum (トリプル・プラチナ) (750,000)
and Million (ミリオン).
After million, each song is certified for each subsequent million it sells (2 million, 3 million, etc).
Ringtone certifications begin at Double Platinum (500,000).
What's this with Chaku Uta and stuff?
There are originally three digital formats in Japan:
Chaku-uta (着うた（R）) (ringtones), Chaku-uta Full (着うたフル（R）) (full-length songs downloaded on cellphones) and PC downloads (PC配信). Chaku Uta full and PC downloads are now together Single Track (シングル総合).
The Chaku Uta name is a shortened version of Chakushin Melody (着信メロディー Ringtone (lit. "arrival melody")) and Uta (うた Song). The song downloads are called full-length ringtones since the ringtone service was well established before downloading music on your cellphone was. Chaku-uta Full started in 2004 by KDDI, and spread from there.