Twitter recently shuttered its confusing and underused #music initiative, but the company hasn’t given up on our world just yet. They’re now teaming with Billboard to track real-time social trends about songs and music conversations. The new co-branded charts are expected to launch in the next several weeks and will reflect two primary sets of discussion: what’s driving chatter at the moment and what, over time, has been discussed the most.
“Twitter is where the music of the moment is discovered and discussed — every day, new songs and new artists are breaking on the platform,” said Bob Moczydlowsky, Twitter’s head of music. “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.”
The move follows a recent trend for Billboard in incorporating digital platforms into their industry reporting statistics. In 2010, they launched the “Social 50 Artist Chart,” which ranks artists based on their social-media metrics, and more recently, they started incorporating stream numbers from places like Spotify and YouTube into the Billboard Hot 100 rankings. That, of course, coincided with the “Harlem Shake” meme.
But one has to wonder: Will this new Twitter chart translate into sales for the (still) struggling music industry? Probably not, but we’re assuming that musicians can now Tweet that they they hit the top of the Twitter charts. #Yay?
