Over the past few days, I've been paying attention to music charts based on Twitter traffic. Each of the versions in this rapidly growing new field use different mechanisms to determine what is popular at the moment.
The Twitter Music Chart developed by The Hype Machine isn't strictly real-time, as it aggregates mentions of songs over the past three days. What's interesting about the scoring mechanism is that each tweet is ranked based on how many people are following the author, so not all mentions are equal. While this sounds like a good idea, it can lead to results that are easily skewed by popular users. Case-in-point: TechCrunch author Erick Schonfeld used his account with almost one million followers to put Rick Astley at the top of the charts with just one tweet.
The Twitter Chart from Hunted doesn't publish its algorithm but a quick comparison of the songs on each reveal they are clearly different. TweetTunes uses a pre-compiled database of artists and searches Twitter "every once in a while" to determine an artists' popularity.
None of these charts are extremely accurate in determining who or what is actually being listened to or purchased via the real-time online communications stream and it will be a long time before anyone replaces the Billboard charts as the chart of record, but they do give a pulse on what is being discussed and are excellent tools for discovering new music.
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