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Twitter Music Chart: A Billboard Hot 100 for Twitter?

Posted on | July 14, 2009 | No Comments

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There are a ton of ways to rank and share music via the ubiquitous microblogging platform Twitter – the best ones can be found in our recent post, 10 Ways to Share Music on Twitter. Since so much music is shared on the microblogging service, it’s possible to use this data to figure out which songs are attracting the most buzz, much like Twitter’s trending topics.

However, MP3 blog aggregator The Hype Machine is not happy with any of the Twitter-based solutions on the market. Specifically, they call out their quality, their lack of transparency, and their lack of innovation. So Hype Machine built its own Twitter music service: Twitter Music Chart, which utilizes a simple algorithm to not only share music, but to rank songs in a fashion reminiscent of the Billboard 100.

Twitter Music Chart utilizes The Hype Machine’s infrastructure to play and collect music – not too different from the main website itself. However, this is a popularity metric more than a sharing tool. Twitter Music Chart monitors the Twittersphere for Hype Machine links. It then ranks those link shares based on the amount of friends and followers you have and assigns points for each tweet that goes towards its popularity algorithm.

Essentially, the point is to figure out what songs are the most popular utilizing the number of shares and the quality of the shares – so yes, if you have more followers, you’re more influential to the system. The song ratings are based on the last three days. Actually, they’ve posted the formula they utilize, if you’re interested:

round(( 1/3 * (twitter_followers / 10) ^ 0.5 ) * (twitter_followers / twitter_friends) * 10))

Currently, Remember The Time (Sleeper Heartbroken Remix) is the #1 song on Twitter according to The Hype Machine. This tool also provides a user leaderboard based on your contribution to these rankings.

In its blog post, Hype Machine really laid out a case for its frustration and why its chart is different. While we think many of the Twitter music-sharing tools are better than they give credit for, Hype Machine’s solution is definitely elegant and transparent. The sample size they rely upon is still too small to be a reliable metric of Twitter’s true music attitude, but it’s an innovation in the right direction.

Author: Ben Parr

Via: Mashable

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Category: Uncategorized

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