Billboard

Billboard is an American music and entertainment trade publication and brand best known for producing charts that track the popularity and performance of songs and albums in the United States. Since its founding in 1894 as a trade newspaper for the bill-posting and advertising industry, Billboard has expanded to cover entertainment media, music, and related industries. In the mid-20th century, it began publishing music charts, culminating in the creation of the Hot 100 singles chart, which has become one of the industry’s standard measures of a song’s overall popularity. The magazine also publishes album charts and a range of genre-specific charts, along with news, features, reviews, and industry analysis.

Billboard operates in print and digital formats and maintains an online presence with charts, articles, and data-intensive features. The brand serves as a primary source for data-driven metrics used by artists, labels, radio programmers, and advertisers. It also administers the Billboard Music Awards, a high-profile annual ceremony recognizing chart performance across multiple genres. Data for its charts has long relied on a combination of sales, radio airplay, and, more recently, streaming activity, with SoundScan and other data providers supplying the underlying statistics since the 1990s and 2000s.

The term "billboard" also denotes large outdoor advertising signs, from which the publication derives its original name.