Sean Paul’s First Diamond Single Is One He Only Features On

Sean Paul on the mainstage at the Venoge Festival.

Sean Paul has been making hit records since the late nineties. In January he collected the first Diamond certification of his career, and it is not for any of them.

The record is “Cheap Thrills” — a Sia song, produced by Greg Kurstin, on which he appears as the featured artist.

Eleven Million Units

DancehallMag reported the certification on 22 January: the RIAA marked the 2016 single 11 times platinum, representing more than eleven million units in combined US sales and streaming, past the ten million that Diamond status requires.

The record had last been certified 9X Platinum in 2024, which shows the shape of the thing. This is not a burst of new attention; it is a song that has been quietly accumulating two million units in two years, a decade after release.

Billboard filed it under the accolades a career of this length collects. NY Carib News called it a landmark moment. Both are true, and both slightly understate how odd the specific record is.

A Song Rihanna Turned Down

Sia wrote “Cheap Thrills” for Rihanna’s Anti. She had already co-written “Diamonds” for her, so the pitch was not speculative.

It was turned down. Sia then recorded it herself for This Is Acting, an album assembled entirely from songs she had written for other stars and had rejected — which is an unusually candid premise for a major-label pop record.

She recruited Sean Paul to add what DancehallMag calls his signature Jamaican flair to the synth-pop track. The result became Sia’s first and only Billboard Hot 100 number one.

It also made her the first woman over forty to top the Hot 100 since Madonna did it with “Music” in 2000. For Sean Paul it was a fourth chart-topper and his first in a decade, after “Get Busy”, “Baby Boy” and “Temperature”.

For Sia the certification is a second Diamond, after “Chandelier” reached the mark in 2024. Two Diamond singles from a writer whose stated method on this album was recycling material other people had declined is a fairly damning verdict on how those decisions get made.

The premise of This Is Acting deserves its own note. A songwriter of Sia’s standing spends much of her working life producing material for other artists, and the industry norm is that rejected songs simply disappear. Releasing them under her own name, and labelling the album accordingly, turned the ordinary invisible waste of professional songwriting into the record’s concept.

They Have Never Met

The detail that reframes the whole thing: Sean Paul and Sia have never been in a room together.

They worked remotely on “Cheap Thrills” and remotely again in November 2021 on “Dynamite”, which appeared on his album Scorcha. Two collaborations, one of them the biggest-certified record either has, and no meeting.

That is entirely normal now and would have been impossible for most of the history of this music. A dancehall vocal cut in one country and dropped onto a synth-pop track built in another is exactly the kind of record that only exists because of how files move.

It is also a very old dancehall practice wearing new clothes. Voicing a track you did not build, over a rhythm somebody else made, is the founding method of the entire form — the riddim system Buju Banton spent an interview defending. The only new part is the distance.

What He Is Actually Certified For

His own catalogue tells a different story about where the American units are. “Bailando” with Enrique Iglesias sits at 4X Platinum. “Temperature” and “Rockabye” with Clean Bandit are 3X. “Do You Remember” with Jay Sean and Lil Jon is 2X.

“Get Busy” and “We Be Burnin'” — the records that made him internationally famous — are certified Platinum. One million units each.

Read as a list, it says something uncomfortable about how dancehall travels in the American market. The songs where Sean Paul is the lead artist plateau; the songs where he is the featured guest on somebody else’s pop record are the ones that run for a decade.

None of that is a judgement on the records. “Temperature” is the better song by most measures. Certification measures consumption, and consumption follows playlisting, radio format and whose audience the song is filed under.

The format question is the whole of it. A record credited to a dancehall artist gets worked to urban radio and sits in dancehall and reggae playlists; the same voice on a record credited to a pop singer goes to pop radio and lands in the playlists that hundreds of millions of people leave running. Nothing about the performance changes. What changes is the number of doors the song is allowed through, and a decade of streaming compounds that difference into three million units.

A Very Short Jamaican List

DancehallMag places the achievement in context, and the context is thin. Only one other Jamaican-connected act holds a Diamond single in the US: Major Lazer, for “Lean On” with DJ Snake and MØ in 2015.

Bob Marley sits outside the comparison entirely. Legend is certified 18 times platinum and is approaching double Diamond as an album, which is a different category of longevity.

The Shaggy case is the instructive one. He holds no Diamond certification at all, though Hot Shot was certified 6X Platinum in 2001. Luminate’s tracking puts the album’s actual US consumption at 8.8 million units as of last year — meaning the paperwork has simply not been updated to match what people have listened to.

Certifications are applied for, not awarded automatically. A label has to file, pay and audit, and for a catalogue whose label relationships have changed hands several times, nobody necessarily has the incentive to do it.

Which is worth holding on to when reading any of these numbers. A certification is a record of paperwork filed, not a measurement of what people listened to. The gap between Shaggy’s 6X Platinum plaque and his 8.8 million actual units is nearly three million records that exist in the listening and not in the ledger — and there is no reason to assume his is the only catalogue in that position.

Sixty-Six Weeks in Britain

The song’s life outside America was similarly long. It spent sixty-six weeks on the UK Singles Chart and peaked at No. 2, and it was nominated for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance at the 59th Grammy Awards.

Sixty-six weeks is well over a year of continuous charting for a single, which is the pattern of a song that becomes ambient rather than one that spikes. That is the same behaviour visible in the certification history: 9X Platinum in 2024, 11X two years later, with no reissue or campaign in between.

For a dancehall artist, that pattern is worth noting for a reason beyond the plaque. Records that stay in rotation this long generate income for decades, and a featured credit on one is a more durable asset than a number one under your own name.

The Diamond award is for a song he did not write, on an album he was not on, made with a singer he has never met — and it is, by the only measure the RIAA keeps, the biggest record of his life.

About The Author

Will Lisil

Founder of MW3.biz, building technology that empowers creators and democratising access to digital tools.

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