Billboard has long been recognized as the go-to outlet for week-to-week popular music charts. Since Billboard published their first ever music popularity chart in July of 1940, they’ve been regarded as the music industry standard for popularity charts. Every week, Billboard includes their “ Billboard Hot 100” in their magazine, but now, they’ve decided that a weekly chart just isn’t good enough. Who needs last week’s popular tunes? We want right now’s popular tunes, apparently.
The social media platform Twitter announced a “multi-year partnership” with Billboard to bring us the “Billboard Twitter Real-Time Charts,” which are scheduled to lunch in the coming weeks.
Twitter will track music-related conversations in the U.S. via the millions of Tweets sent each day and will combine its real-time data with Billboard’s expertise to bring fourth real-time music popularity charts. It’s basically a more structured music-related “trending” section, and it’s bound to reshape the way in which we measure the popularity and success of music.
“Twitter is where the music of the moment is discovered and discussed — every day, new songs and new artists are breaking on the platform,” Twitter’s head of music Bob Moczydlowsky told Billboard. “We’re partnering with Billboard to create a ground-breaking chart to track the conversation around music as it happens. This means when artists share songs and engage with their audience on Twitter, the buzz they create will now be visible to fans, other musicians and industry decision makers in real-time.”