The Billboard Twitter Real-Time charts are four interactive Billboard music magazine charts first published on May 27, 2014. The chart ranks trending songs from popular and emerging artists based on how often they are mentioned in "tweets" sent by Twitter in the United States.
Contents
The charts "Trending 140", "Emerging Artists", "Weekly Top Tracks" and "Weekly Emerging Artists" are reported to define how fans interact with, and influence, popular content by ranking the most popular songs being shared on Twitter in the U.S. The first two charts update on a "real-time" minute-by-minute basis, with the last two charts providing weekly summaries.
History
These charts, for Billboard, represented an ongoing attempt to incorporate new-music consumption and sharing technologies in its charts. In 2013, Billboard added YouTube plays to its Billboard Hot 100 formula, alongside its Social 50 that already tracked which artists are most active on social networks, and included data from Twitter.
For Twitter, it was a follow-up to its failed Apple "#music" app, launched in April 2013 to track music on Twitter, which intended to acquaint users with new acts and see what their contacts were listening to. The app had a "Popular" page, showing music trending across Twitter, and an "Emerging" page, showing "hidden talent found in tweets." On March 21, 2014, the Twitter Music account tweeted that the app would discontinue on April 18, and said in another tweet, "We continue to experiment with new ways to bring you great content based on the music activity we see every day on Twitter." On March 27, 2014, Billboard and Twitter announced the partnership for the Billboard Twitter Real-Time Charts, and Twitter Amplify to help with chart distribution; along with custom in-Tweet charts and a weekly in-Tweet video round up of the week in music.
Music is one of the most popular topics on Twitter, and pop stars routinely dominate its list of the most popular personalities on the service, with most of the top accounts being musicians. Billboard President John Amato said “Twitter, for us, felt like the right way to capture real time more than anything else that we could think of,” and “They’re the only people that have true scale in real time. Facebook is a behemoth."
Chart data collection
The "Trending 140" chart is 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. The weekly ranking chart, "Weekly Top Tracks" is listed by the volume of shares over a seven-day period (Monday to Sunday).
The "Emerging Artists" chart is 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. The weekly ranking chart, "Weekly Emerging Artists", is, also, ranked over a seven-day period (Monday to Sunday).
Songs that are shared or mentioned on Twitter are tracked and incorporated into the charts by the following criteria: 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 a hashtag “#nowplaying” or “#np,” along with song/artist name; and the use of various terms associated with the song and song playing, such as “music,” “song,” “track,” “listen.”