Cole's Pick: Chance the Rapper's Two "Blessings" Plaques Close Out Coloring Book's Tenth Year

By Cole Ashby, October 30, 2026

On October 7, 2026, RIAA certified both versions of "Blessings" on Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book. "Blessings (feat. Jamila Woods)" reached Platinum, and the closing "Blessings (feat. Ty Dolla $ign, Raury, BJ The Chicago Kid & Anderson .Paak)" reached Gold. The same date put his tenth-anniversary tour at The Pageant in St. Louis, four days before the October 11 finale, per Live Nation.

My verdict up front: of the 60 hip-hop and R&B plaques RIAA dated October 1 through 23, these two say the most about how a record lasts. Drake's Diamond awards are bigger numbers. This is the better story, because it is an independent mixtape, ten years old, still collecting certifications while the man who made it plays it night after night.

Chance the Rapper, "Blessings (feat. Jamila Woods)"

Ten years under one name

Both RIAA rows list the label as Chance the Rapper, and Apple Music carries Coloring Book under a "℗ 2016 Chance the Rapper" line. Live Nation's tour announcement calls him an "Independent GRAMMY Award-winning artist" and says Coloring Book made him "the first independent artist to win a GRAMMY." Complex noted that the mixtape won Best Rap Album as the "first streaming-only project to earn a golden gramophone," after debuting at No. 8.

Chance has been plain about what that independence means to him. "I think that having the ability to choose the value of my music and the point of sale for myself, that comes strictly out of independence," he told Complex.

That matters because a plaque is not automatic. RIAA certifies on a music company's request, and its fee schedule charges $350 per certification to member companies and $450 per level to non-members. On both of these rows, the company on the label line is Chance the Rapper. A plaque under an artist's own name, a decade on, reads differently from a label's catalog push.

How 2026 stacked up

The plaques did not arrive at once. RIAA certified Coloring Book Platinum on June 26, 2026, a date Complex reported in July. Live Nation had announced the Coloring Book 10 Year Anniversary Tour on May 14, with a first show on August 11 at House of Blues in Cleveland and a last one on October 11 at Citizens Live at The Wylie in Pittsburgh.

The day after the tour opened, RIAA dated a batch of Coloring Book tracks on August 12, with one more on August 14. The Source counted 11 new certifications and reported that Joey Bada$$ presented plaques at the tour's SummerStage stop in Central Park, which Live Nation lists for August 18.

The two "Blessings" came last. With them, 13 of the mixtape's 14 tracks hold RIAA plaques, along with the album itself.

Why the bookends are the pick

"Blessings" appears twice on Coloring Book: as track five, with Jamila Woods, and as track 14, the closer, credited to Ty Dolla $ign, Raury, BJ The Chicago Kid and Anderson .Paak. Repeating a title in the middle and at the end of a project is a structural choice. It asks the listener to treat the second one as an answer to the first. RIAA certified both halves of that idea on the same day.

The levels split, and I would not read too much into which one got further. Platinum means 1 million units under RIAA's rules and Gold means 500,000. RIAA does not publish the streams behind a plaque, and I won't guess at them. What the database does show is that the version at the center of the mixtape and the version that ends it both crossed a line on the same date.

On the road, the song did double duty too. Reviewing the October 11 finale in Pittsburgh, TribLive wrote that "Blessings" came early in the set and "got the audience waving their arms in the air," then returned late as "a slower, more contemplative and church-like version." Before that reprise, TribLive reported, Chance said he prays before going onstage every night of the tour. "This is the first time in the whole tour where I didn't ask for something, I just said thank you," he said.

That line is the closest thing to a thesis for this plaque. Ten years after release, at the end of a tour built around the record, a song called "Blessings" was still earning certifications.

The month around it

Anniversaries ran through October's list. The day after the "Blessings" pair, RIAA dated seven plaques for Don Toliver's Life of a DON, with the album award landing five years to the day after release. Nas's "I Can" went Gold nearly 24 years after God's Son. Catalog keeps coming due.

But the "Blessings" pair is the one I would hand to a young artist weighing a deal. It is a ten-year-old record with an artist's name on the label line, a tour that brought people back to it, and two plaques that arrived while he was still on the road. No certification this month makes a cleaner case for building a catalog you own.

Chance the Rapper, "Blessings (feat. Ty Dolla $ign, Raury, BJ The Chicago Kid & Anderson .Paak)"

Verdict: A decade on, the two "Blessings" make the clearest case this month that an independent record can keep earning on its own terms. Start with: "Blessings (feat. Jamila Woods)".