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Current Billboard logo, since 2013.

The Billboard Twitter Real-Time charts were four interactive Billboard music magazine charts first published on May 27, 2014. The charts ranked trending songs from popular and emerging artists based on how often they are mentioned in messages called "tweets" sent by social networking site Twitter in the United States.^[1]

The charts "Trending 140", "Emerging Artists", "Weekly Top Tracks" and "Weekly Emerging Artists" were reported to define how fans interacted with, and influenced, popular content by ranking the most popular songs being shared on Twitter in the U.S. The first two charts updated on a "real-time" minute-by-minute basis, with the last two charts providing weekly summaries.^[2]

In August 2017, for the charts dating September 2, the "Trending 140" and real-time charts were discontinued and the Emerging Artists chart was revised to become a "breakout" of the overall Artist 100 chart, highlighting the top-performing rising acts of each week.^[3]

History

2014: Charts created

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,^[4] and included data from Twitter.^[5]

For Twitter, it was a follow-up to its failed Apple "#music" app,^[6][7] 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.^[8] The app had a "Popular" page, showing music trending across Twitter, and an "Emerging" page, showing "hidden talent found in tweets."^[9] On March 21, 2014, the "Twitter Music" account wrote 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."^[10] 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.^[11]

Music is one of the most popular topics on Twitter, and music acts routinely dominate its list of the most popular personalities on the service, with most of the top accounts being musicians.^[8] 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."^[4] "Problem" by Ariana Grande was the first song to top the weekly Twitter Top Tracks chart on June 12, 2014.

Chart data collection

The "Trending 140" chart "is an up to the minute ranking of songs shared in the U.S., measured by acceleration over the past hour. This chart can be filtered to present a real-time view of the most shared track in the U.S. over the past 24 hours, with a weekly summary presented as the Billboard Twitter Top Tracks chart on Billboard.com and in print in Billboard".^[12]

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 100,000 Twitter followers who have also not appeared as a lead artist in the top 50 songs on the Billboard Hot 100)",^[13] "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".^[12]

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.”^[12]

2017: Emerging Artists chart revised, others discontinued

Starting with Billboard charts dated September 2, 2017 and released online August 22, all of the Billboard Twitter charts except for Emerging Artists were discontinued. A revamped Emerging Artists chart was modeled after the same formula as the Artist 100 chart which debuted in 2014 and captures the breakout artists not on that chart. It measures artist activity across Billboard's "most influential charts", including Billboard Hot 100, Billboard 200 and the Social 50.^[3]

New methodology

The new chart "incorporates key metrics of music consumption, blending album and track sales, radio airplay, streaming and social media fan interaction to provide a weekly multi-dimensional ranking of artist popularity". And the revised chart will "exclude artists that have notched a top 25 entry on either the Hot 100 or Billboard 200, as well as artists that have achieved two or more top 10s on Billboard's "Hot" song genre charts that blend streaming, airplay and sales data (such as Hot Country Songs, Hot Rock Songs, Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs and Hot Latin Songs) and/or consumption-based "Top" album genre rankings (including counterpart charts Top Country Albums, Top Rock Albums, Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and Top Latin Albums)".^[3]

References

External links

• Emerging Artists