Using Twitter to Predict Chart Position for Songs

With the advent of social media, concepts such as forecasting and now casting became part of the public debate. Past successes include predicting election results, stock prices and forecasting events or behaviors. This work aims at using Twitter data, related to songs and artists that appeared on the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 charts, performing sentiment analysis on the collected tweets, to predict the charts in the future. Our goal was to investigate the relation between the number of mentions of a song and its artist, as well as the semantic orientation of the relevant posts and its performance on the subsequent chart. The problem was approached via regression analysis, which estimated the difference between the actual and predicted positions and moderated results. We also focused on forecasting chart ranges, namely the top 5, 10 and 20. Given the accuracy and F-score achieved compared to previous research, our findings are deemed satisfactory, especially in predicting the top 20.