In the latest show of technological advancement, Music magazine Billboard teams up with Micro-blogging service Twitter to present Real Time Music Charts! Using filtered data from Twitter artsist-fan conversations, hashtags and song title mentions, Billboard cracks the formula to make the first of its kind Top Trending Chart that will get updated by the minute – based on activity over social media! Besides the Top Trending Charts, there is the Emerging Artists Chart that is also real time, and two weekly charts for Twitter Emerging Artists and Twitter Top Tracks. All in all, four new charts that assimilate all the exhaustive social media interaction to attempt to provide a definitive question to “what’s trending?” Bear in mind that although these new interactive charts redefine how fans interact and influence popular content, as most popular songs will be ranked as they are being shared on Twitter, this service is currently picking up data only for the U.S.
Billboard explained that Music is the most discussed subject on Twitter with nearly 1 billion Tweets sent about the topic in 2013 alone! 100 million of those Tweets came from music accounts, and seven of the top 10 most-followed accounts on the entire platform are musicians/artists. Further, they explained how the Real Time Charts will pick up the data and what are the factors that will track a particular song:
* the use of, or the inclusion, of a link to the song via music listening platforms, such as Spotify, Vevo and iTunes.
* the use of various track sharing notations, such as the hashtags “#nowplaying” or “#np,” along with song/artist name.
* the use of various terms associated with the song and song playing, such as “music,” “song,” “track,” “listen.”
Real Time: Billboard Twitter Trending 140
An up-to-the-minute ranking of the fastest moving songs shared on Twitter in the U.S., measured by acceleration over the past hour. Titles are ranked based on a formula comparing the number of times they are shared within the last hour to the hourly average of shares over a rolling 24-hour period. The chart can also be filtered to present a real-time view of the most shared tracks in the U.S. on Twitter over the past 24 hours.
Real Time: Billboard Twitter Emerging Artists
A ranking of the most shared songs on Twitter in the U.S. by up-and-coming artists (defined as artists with fewer than 50,000 Twitter followers who have also not appeared as a lead artist in the top 50 songs on the Billboard Hot 100), ranked by the number of times each song was shared over the past 24 hours.
Weekly: Billboard Twitter Emerging Artists & Billboard Twitter Top Tracks
A weekly ranking of the most shared songs on Twitter in the U.S. by up-and-coming artists, ranked by the number of shares over a seven day period (Monday to Sunday). This chart is available online on billboard.com and billboard.biz, and in print in Billboard. A weekly ranking of the most shared and/or mentioned songs on Twitter in the U.S., listed by the volume of shares over a seven-day period (Monday to Sunday). This chart is available online on billboard.com and billboard.biz, and in print in Billboard.
With the Billboard Twitter Real-Time charts, Billboard gives another example of how it is determined at staying at the forefront of tracking music consumption. Looking to empower music fans and music consumers with rankings that reflect how they interact with music and artists, we applaud this new effort and hope that other countries and regions may soon enjoy this service as well!
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