Billboard's got a new music chart for the most-tweeted-about tracks

Billboard is creating a new chart that tracks the music being most talked about on Twitter. Called “the Billboard Hot Trending Powered by Twitter,” the list will be updated daily, and Billboard will write articles around it looking at why songs are charting.

The new chart is a departure from Billboard’s other charts that track popularity based on actual radio and streaming listens. Now if you tweet that the new Modest Mouse song is making you nostalgic for the 1990s, that song could make the list even if nobody is actually listening to it.

“This is all tied to conversation,” said Sarah Rosen, Twitter’s head of entertainment partnerships, in an interview with Bloomberg. “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 list will surely create its own news as users try and boost their favorite artists up the ranks.

All about the moolah — For Billboard and Twitter, the new list is a moneymaking opportunity. Charts are the most popular section of Billboard’s website, according to Bloomberg, and advertisers can pay to sponsor the new list as well as the articles written around it, therefore aligning themselves with hot trends in music.

Twitter’s ad targeting isn’t as good as Facebook’s, but people go to the site to discuss what’s happening in the world, and its real-time nature lends itself to advertising that’s meant to align a brand with a cultural trend or moment. An advertiser like McDonald’s might see people discussing K-Pop group BTS then quickly buy ads around it to promote the company’s BTS collaboration meal, for instance.