A Deep Dive of Mason’s “Perfect (Exceeder)” Ft Princess Superstar: Bringing The 2000s Back Through Sync

5 min readFeb 20, 2024

The song “Perfect (Exceeder)” by artist Mason ft. Princess Superstar was a 2000’s dance music club hit. Once the hype of the song died down, nobody expected it to reach a level of popularity that exceeded its peak success in 2008. However, in November 2023, the artist made a sync deal in which the song was placed in the hit movie “Saltburn.”

The song immediately benefited from the virality of the movie on all DSPs and social media platforms. Through a well-crafted sync deal, a new generation of people were able to discover this fun club classic. This has happened with several artists and songs in the current digital age, and while we see a song everywhere, it can be hard to quantify how big the impact actually is. In this article, we ask what are the measurable effects of a viral sync placement on a song that saw its prime years ago?

The Data Curation

To create the picture of what the impact of the “Saltburn” sync deal looks like, I sourced data from three main outlets. Chartmetric was used to gather the daily and total Spotify and Youtube streams for the song “Perfect (Exceeder).” WARM provided the airplay data to look into the demographics of the listeners, and Tik Tok provided the numbers to assess the range of user generated content that was created post movie release.

Double the Releases Equals Double the Spike

“Saltburn” was released two seperate times during the winter of 2023. According to the data, there was a spike with each release. The first and more subtle increase in activity happened on Nov 21, 2023, when the movie was released in theaters. A more significant boost came on Dec 22, 2023, when the movie was released on the Prime Video streaming platform. The song reached a maximum daily stream of 657,130. Before the theater release the song was only getting on average 20,000 streams per day, but post release, the song was getting 100,000 new streams minimum each day. That is a 400% increase in streams.

In the past 6 months there has been a significant increase in total Spotify streaming and YouTube video views that can be accredited to the Prime Video release which is highlighted in the graph below.

From the Club to the Tik Tok Creators

On Tik Tok the song gained traction, and 59.7K people made videos using the track including the artist Princess Superstar. People all over the world created videos to the song and allowed for an increased reach for the song. Below is the Tik Tok sound of “Perfect (Exceeder)” and the number of posts created using it. According to Chartmetric data, the song went from 20 post to 59.7K during the period following the movie release.

Where in The World are We Listening to Perfect (Exceeder)

The song originally gained popularity in the UK where it got to number 3 on the UK Singles Chart and number 1 on the UK Dance Chart. This correlates with where the song is getting the most airplay in the world. The UK was the #1 country to play the song on February 13, 2024 with a total of 9,422 seconds which amounts to 57 times in one day. The UK seemed to reclaim their throne as the original fans of the song. The graph below shows where the song was played, and which areas played the song the most.

The song was played all over the world with the following 5 countries being the ones with the highest airplay. A viral movie can lead into a viral song which can result in more countries wanting to give the song airplay.

Limitations

The data gathered from Chartmetric was from the past 6 months. However, to get a complete picture of the impact of the sync deal on, it would be helpful to investigate all remixes of the song as a radio station may have played a remix rather than the original.
The Tik Tok data on Chartmetric did not match what I found on Tik Tok, so I was not able to make a graph about the correlation between the sync deal and Tik Tok posts. It is likely that the graph would show much more social media traction than the data provided.
The WARM data was only for the airplays on February 13, 2024. The demographic analysis is based on a snapshot of the data rather than a time analysis. The Chartmetric data also does not provide any information on demographics, so there is no solid information on where streams are taking place.
Data was only collected from Spotify, YouTube, Tik Tok, and WARM airplays. Information from other DSPs and social media would add information and data points to the research.

Concluding Thoughts

Based on the data, there was a dramatic increase in song activity due to the sync deal with “Saltburn” and it ended up causing a 400% increase in streaming, an influx of Tik Tok videos, and a solid daily air play for a 20-year-old song. Older artist can look at this case as proof that the right sync deal can breathe new life into an old song and allow for opportunities in your career that you thought were 20 years behind you. Even 2000s songs thought to be done can fight their way back to the mainstream through these types of deals.

The artist Mason said it best while discussing the resurgence of the song, “It came super unexpectedly and maybe that’s a message of hope for people,” he says. “You never know what will happen with your catalogue. Your catalogue is your pension. It has value.”