Twitter Top Tracks

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.

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.

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."

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