iLike and Billboard Join Forces to Produce Social Media Charts

We have some exciting news to share! We just made an exciting joint announcement with Billboard, the premiere music industry publication and the world's most trusted brand for music charts.

Billboard has agreed to syndicate two new iLike music charts:

• Weekly top songs added on Facebook
• Weekly top songs added on iTunes / Windows MediaPlayer

To put this news into perspective, these are Billboard's first-ever social media based charts. Both weekly charts will draw upon the massive volume of daily music activity that iLike tracks across the Internet. We expect these charts will become important industry tools.

Here's what Billboard's vice president and editorial director of the digital division had to say about this multi-tiered chart and content initiative: "The popularity of iLike makes this data a compelling tool for music lovers to discover new music as well as for marketers to track audience trendlines,” said Scott McKenzie, Billboard's parent company. “We’re thrilled to be bringing the music and social media industries together in such an innovative way.” 

As part of this announcement, Billboard will also provide live newsfeeds to iLike.com and iLike on Facebook.

For more details, please read the press release.

Comments

[Mike]

Hell yea! Congrats ilike!
Next step is to get involved with CMJ?

[Clay Newton]

This is great news. It will be exciting to see your charts and relationship evolve!

[Simon Esteaves]

Cool! Although... haven't Last.fm been doing this a lot longer than you guys?

[Anon]

first ever? thats just lame

[Frits]

First-ever, sure :P

[Emily Glassman]

Sorry that we weren’t more clear. This is the first time Billboard has made social media based music charts available. But they clearly aren’t the first-ever social media based music charts.

Those of you who have commented are right: the original language was confusing. We’ve since updated the posting to clarify the first-ever reference.

Sincerely,

Emily Glassman
iLike PR

[darren grimstead]

I'm still waiting for a company, seems like iLike could easily pull this off, to take the XML feeds from all the Billboard Charts (dating back to the first Chart) as a way of managing my music library. For instance, if my music library had 5-10,000 songs in it from 1975-2007 across many genres and i wanted to quickly create playlists, it would seem an application that leveraged the Billboard data to: match song+artist (reconcile the year and genre to first release date) and associate songs that made Number 1 songs with a 5 Star rating, the song in the Top 10 with a 4.5 Star Rating, on down to .5 Star Ratings for songs in the 90-100 on the charts. This way it would take me 10 seconds to pull a 1970's Dance/Disco Playlist of the 67 songs in my library. this is the opposite of Discovery, it's about finding and managing what you already have and suggesting songs that might compliment that playlist, i.e. You are missing Dancing Queen a 5 Star 1970's Disco anthem > click to purchase.