ARIA

ARIA stands for the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA). The ARIA is a trade group representing music companies in Australia. It has more than 100 members, including the Australian arms of the "big four", Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner. The group oversees collection, distribution and administration of music licenses and royalties in Australia. ARIA and Motorola provide the Motorola ARIA charts.

A single or album shipped to a music retailer over 35,000 times is considered Gold, while 70,000 times will receive Platinum status. The ARIA also offers Digital Track Chart, which collects data from online music download stores such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes or BigPond Music.

Like it's international American equivalent, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), ARIA takes an offensive stance towards Internet file sharing of music subject to copyright (of its members) on P2P networks. It's anti-piracy arm, Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) is infamous for its part in legal proceedings brought against Sharman Networks' Kazaa file sharing client, which has been used globally to trade billions of songs over the FastTrack network.

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