Twitter has announced one part of its new music strategy today, with a Billboard partnership that will result in the new ‘Billboard Twitter Real-Time Chart.’ The new tool will follow real-time conversation around U.S. music, monitoring mentions of artists, albums and songs being discussed both in the moment, and over time. That data will feed charts updated daily, and made distributable via Twitter Amplify, with custom charts for use in tweets themselves, as well as video clips of the weekly trends in music also distributable via Twitter.
Billboard.com will host the chart, which gives Twitter access to a new, more mainstream audience for the real-time data and conversations around music it’s seeing on its network, and the @Billboard official account will also tweet out the results. Twitter’s new head of music Bob Moczydlowsky, who took over in September after the previous Twitter Music strategy faltered, called the social network the place “where the music of the moment is discovered and discussed,” and said the partnership will help artists make visible “the buzz they create […] to fans, other musicians and industry decision makers in real-time.”
Billboard has embraced social sources for music rankings before, including streaming services in its measurement system and offering a chart of the most active artists on social media, but this is a more real-time attempt to measure sentiment as it happens on the web. For Twitter, it’s a chance to show off its existing strengths regarding music on its network – this is more about visibility, and demonstrating value, and the language used by Twitter in both its own official blog post and that of Billboard reflects that.