As many of us know Billboard tracks various success levels of records, songs and artists.
There is a Billboard tracker called 'hotplay' relating to the amount of times a song is played.
How is this determined?
Is there some sort of a reporting mechanism that radio stations use to indicate the number of times they have played a song and logged and reported it to Billboard?
The "hot" trackers try to measure full exposure of the song through different channels, buy aggregating data from radio airplay, sales, and streaming.
Radio exposure is measured by a subjective concept of "audience impressions" (quoting from Billboard's own site). Normally this would be evaluated by using marketing measurement methods, i.e. inquiry of a sample audience, not the number of times the song was played (that won't tell you how many people actually listened to it). But it could be a complex method involving number a plays, yes, together with global audience ratings for each show, etc.
The different channels have different weights to (at least in theory) account for the different characteristics. I don't know about radio, but I know that regarding streaming, 1500 plays (yes, 15 hundred) count the same as the sale of 1 unit of a physical product (e.g. CD or Vynil).
