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Twitter and Billboard partner for real-time music charts

Twitter and Billboard are announcing today a deal to create the Billboard Twitter Real-Time Charts: an ever-changing and updated chart/list of music that’s being talked about and shared by Twitter users.

The charts, which should begin tracking in May, will be published on Billboard.com as well as the official Billboard Twitter feed. In-tweet charts and in-tweet video round ups of the week’s music news will be included in the feed.

“Billboard has always been the standard by which music popularity is measured, and Twitter and its millions of users worldwide have added an entirely new dimension and pace to the way the marketplace interacts with, and evaluates, music and music-makers,” said Janice Min, co-president of the Entertainment Group of Guggenheim Media, the company that owns Billboard, in a statement.

On Twitter’s part, the deal certainly looks like an attempt to correct the failure of their #Music service, an application that publicized the popularity of music on Twitter, which was recently pulled from the app store. For Billboard, the deal looks like an innovative strategy to boost the relevance and reach of the trade publication’s chart rankings and industry analysis. The company has, after all, modified their charts to address technological changes in music consumption before—including YouTube streams as grounds for ranking a song’s chart position.

 

 

It could be a tethered approach to quantifying the specific social media buzz that creates and fuels a buzz band. It will be interesting to see how it shifts the industry’s reaction and approach to emerging artists. Now, when you talked about your new, favorite band on Twitter, Billboard will be watching.

Twitter head of music Bob Moczydlowsky sums it up, stating, “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.”