MTV Unveils Music Meter: A Hot 100 for the Social Media Age

 

Today, MTV launches its Music Meter, a new artist ranking service aimed at turn over traditional music charts. Rather than simply track CD sales (who buy those anymore?) and radio airplay, Music Meter ranks the top 100 artists bubbling up on a variety of non-traditional platforms.

By tracking an artist's social media buzz (tweets, blog posts, articles) and streams (YouTube, Vevo) in addition to purchase data, MTV's chart shows a more real-time representation of up-and-coming artists. It will revive daily. The chart is based on velocity rather than total popularity, so it will only show artists who are raising quickly not those who are sitting in the No. 1 spot.

"Let's not always have the big guys on top let's invite users to discover performers that they may not know they love yet," says Shannon Connolly, VP of Digital Music Strategy at MTV Networks. "We chose to strip out the most popular artists that you see dominating all lists so you won't see Gaga or Bieber."

Instead, users will find an eclectic mix of rising stars--those buzzing on the indie scene that has yet to go main stream. Each artist is featured in a widget-style box that provides news, tweets, videos and song previews and purchases via Rhapsody.