Billboard Is Partnering With Twitter To Rank Music In New Chart

Billboard announced plans yesterday to team up with Twitter to add a new chart, dubbed “the Billboard Hot Trending Powered by Twitter."

The latest chart will do exactly what its name implies, gauging how many Twitter conversations are happening around a particular song on a given day, Gizmodo reports.

It’s a metric that Sarah Rosen, Twitter’s head of entertainment partnerships, said will be instrumental in an age when social media plays such an integral role in determining the zeitgeist, or what is being discussed in popular culture. She said, “This is all tied to conversation. This is another cool way to slice and dice music data that’s different from what they are doing with all the other charts out there.”

The new strategy will reportedly also have an impact on Billboard’s editorial workflow, where staffers will be tasked with writing up stories and producing videos around the data, which will eventually appear on Billboard’s own website as well as Twitter.

Julian Holguin, Billboard’s president, said that advertisers can also expect to get in on the action either by sponsoring the chart or by buying sponsorships within the resultant videos that are spun out of the charts’ data points. She said, “Advertisers can align with the hottest trends in music and the most buzzworthy topics. Moving at the speed of culture is hard to do, and this chart can help advertisers take part in that.”