Case Study: How Netflix’s “Purple Hearts” Supercharged Sofia Carson’s Music Stats

Urska Jaksa

Nov 10, 2022

Sofia Carson portrayed the lead role in the Netflix movie “Purple Hearts”. She also co-wrote and performed the soundtrack, which is an integral part of the movie’s storyline. A month after its release, Carson:

• gained 500+ spots on the overall Viberate artist chart,
• doubled her TikTok fanbase and Spotify monthly listeners, and
• increased her total monthly engagement from 14.5M to 89.9M.

“Purple Hearts” is a movie as American as apple pie, currently #7 on Netflix by hours watched in the first 28 days (228.7M according to Netflix’s data). In a nutshell, it tells the story of a singer-songwriter Cassie (played by Carson), who’s struggling with medical bills, and a Marine, her political polar opposite, who marry for military benefits but end up falling for each other.

📌 Viberate Analytics: Professional music analytics suite at an unbeatable price: $9.90/mo. Charts, talent discovery tools, plus Spotify, TikTok, and other channel-specific analytics of every artist out there.

Sync licensing has been at the forefront of many music business debates lately, even posing the question of whether sync is the new radio. Stranger Things highlighted this phenomenon by boosting streaming stats for Kate Bush’s "Running Up That Hill" and Metallica’s "Master of Puppets". Here, we’re investigating a mid-level artist's streaming and social media data to see just how big of a launchpad a placement in a hit series or movie can be.

In this case study, we’re investigating how Netflix exposure impacted Carson’s own fanbase and engagement numbers using Viberate's music data analytics.

Case study framework

Analyzed artist: Sofia Carson

Monitored project: “Purple Hearts” movie and soundtrack

Data analytics tool: Viberate

Movie & soundtrack release date: July 29, 2022

Monitored period: July 1–September 20, 2022

Sofia Carson: Career Performance

Looking at Sofia Carson’s “Career Performance” below, we notice a very prominent “hockey stick” graph after the movie's release on July 29. This trajectory is an aggregation of the artist’s data from social media and music channels. She also gained 500+ spots on the overall Viberate artist chart from July 1 (rank: 732) to September 1 (rank: 176).

Carson had a substantial pre-existing audience due to her music career and Disney appearances, and she also starred in Netflix’s movie “Feel the Beat” in 2020. 

However, after the “Purple Hearts” release, there was a massive spike in her social media fanbase. She gained more than 3M new followers on Instagram and TikTok each in the following month. In the case of TikTok, that doubled her fanbase.

In total, she gained 6.9M new fans in August, which is 13.5x more than in July. Her total engagement increased from 14.5M in July to 89.9M in August (that’s a 75.4M increase).

Streaming Analysis

In this section, we analyze the impact on music consumption. In August, Carson’s monthly YouTube views and Spotify streams each increased by approximately 50M.

Monthly listeners more than doubled one month after the movie’s release (see the graph below). We can also see the impact in comparison to her previous role (marked with *). The green highlight in the right table indicates that Carson’s stats are above the industry average.

Album Release Benchmark

For comparison, let’s look at how an album release impacted the Spotify monthly listeners of similarly ranked Mainstream Pop artists in a one-month period – without the movie’s promotional platform. Below are the stats for Sabrina Carpenter, Kiiara, and Madison Beer. Sofia Carson leads according to both absolute and percentage increase of monthly listeners.

“Purple Hearts (Original Soundtrack)”: Performance Analysis

Let’s zoom in on the performance of the “Purple Hearts” original soundtrack album. The featured tracks gathered 94M Spotify streams by September 20. All eight of the tracks were among Carson’s top 10 tracks according to 7-day and 1-month streams. 

The tracks were used in 94,400 TikTok videos by the same date. 

“Come Back Home”, the lead single and the theme song of “Purple Hearts”, leads on both channels.

Sofia Carson: Playlist Placements

Sofia Carson’s overall playlist reach increased by 18.4M from July 1 to September 1. 

Her most playlisted song by far was “Come Back Home” (as seen in the table below).

Spillover Effect on Sofia Carson’s Pre-existing Tracks

Looking at four of Carson’s earlier songs to investigate the movie’s impact, we discovered that the average weekly streams of all four analyzed songs increased. “Love Is the Name” was affected the most– its average weekly streams increased by 62% after the “Purple Hearts” release. See all four examples below.

Summary

Data analysis of Sofia Carson’s fanbase growth and engagement shows a clear correlation between the spike and the “Purple Hearts” movie and soundtrack release. Today, the momentum has slowed down, but Carson still ranks at no. 196 on the overall Viberate artist chart.

One commonality between the aforementioned Kate Bush and Metallica is the immersion of music into the storyline, resulting in a major boost to the artist's social media and streaming stats. Similar results on different scales can also be measured for syncs of other established, mid-level and up-and-coming artists.

We conducted this case study with Viberate, a music data analytics platform built to help industry professionals make informed decisions faster. Dive deeper into Sofia Carson’s stats (or explore a similar case) here. You can register your account and try music data analytics for free.