At this point it’s clear that the Internet has become at least as important to a pop song’s success as old-school terrestrial radio. When Billboard began including digital streams in its formula for determining placement on the Hot 100 in late 2012 it radically altered the chart’s makeup, and since then songs that haven’t been promoted by their labels as singles (including meme-connected songs like Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” and Ylvis’s “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)”) have charted almost entirely off of YouTube plays. Including digital streams in their mainstream charts went a long way towards bringing Billboard‘s rankings in line with how people are actually consuming pop music.
Judging the popularity of music, or in fact pretty much any thing or concept, on Twitter requires a lot of filtering. Running a universal search on an act’s name and tallying up the number of returns you get is massively ineffective when you’re dealing with a platform that’s perfectly engineered for shit-talking, so judging their popularity, and not just the extent to which people are talking about them (which are two very different things), would require sorting out irrelevant mentions.
