Charting Changes......

   Not sure how I feel about this. Hard to imagine the charts being any worse. Guess we'll see. In no way am I a fan of Twitter. In fact, I avoid it like the plague. If I had to describe modern day Billboard in one word it would have to be "woke". Links included, though am going to do the copy / paste method to spare you the click bait.

Billboard Is Partnering With Twitter to Rank Music in a New, Fun Way

Billboard — the music industry’s stalwart chart resource — announced plans on Wednesday to team up with Twitter to give the people what they want: more charts.

The latest chart, dubbed “the Billboard Hot Trending Powered by Twitter,” will do exactly what its name implies: gauge how many Twitter conversations are happening around a particular song on a given day. It’s a metric that Sarah Rosen, Twitter’s head of entertainment partnerships, told Bloomberg will be instrumental in an age when social media plays such an integral role in determining the zeitgeist.

“This is all tied to conversation,” Rosen said. “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, in that staffers will also 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.

Billboard’s president, Julian Holguin, told Bloomberg that advertisers can also expect to get in on the action — what a relief! — either by sponsoring the chart or by buying sponsorships within the resultant videos that are spun out of the charts’ data points.

“Advertisers can align with the hottest trends in music and the most buzzworthy topics,” Holguin said. “Moving at the speed of culture is hard to do, and this chart can help advertisers take part in that.”

But look past the corporate chart jargon and you’ll see the disturbing and obvious truth: This tool in the hands of Gen Z is just another way to ensure that Santana’s 1999 hit “Smooth” reenters the cultural conversation, once again dominating the discourse during the summer of 2021.

Really though, a music economy that’s in any way dictated by tweets just seems like the logical extension of a gig economy where positive user ratings are a boon to earnings, or the crowdfunding platforms people flock to when their loved ones are sick and need insulin. Crowdsourcing anything, whether it be vital resources or popular music, isn’t the most reliable system for determining merit, talent or need — it’s just an arbitrary way to figure out who can generate the most clicks, either by activating their “hive” or by pulling on lucky invisible tendrils of the social structure that connects us all.

Twitter's new Billboard chart will highlight trending songs

Twitter has announced quite a lengthy list of live and on-demand video content deals at the Digital Content NewFronts event, and one of its most notable partnership projects will give rise to a Billboard chart of sorts that's powered by social media. The Billboard Hot Trending powered by Twitter will showcase trending songs and music across the platform and will feature video and editorial content.

Since users can create a buzz around any song — say, something that's currently playing at a big event or a song featured in a movie — the list could contain both new tracks and classics released decades ago. The chart will be refreshed every 24 hours to keep up with the conversations dominating Twitter and to give users a reason to keep checking it. The company says companies can connect to the chart through "innovative ad formats that will live on Twitter and across Billboard." We'll just have to wait and see what those "innovative ad formats" look like.

I remember a previous initiative about "real time" charts or some such rubbish. It always comes across as looking for the wrong solution, because fixing the right problem would involve admittance of failure.