She’s Got a Blank Check, and She’ll Write Your Name: Taylor Swift’s Billion-Dollar Business Playbook

 You didn’t have to be a Swiftie to take note of the musical juggernaut that was Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. The cultural moment reached financial and literal earthquake status.

In There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift, Harvard Business Review Senior Editor Kevin Evers argues that Swift’s illustrious pop career isn’t purely songwriting and spectacle. It’s also top-tier business acumen. He spoke with b. about why the superstar would give any CMO a run for their money.

b.: What sparked your interest in studying Taylor Swift?

Evers: The sheer size of her popularity. The Eras tour grossed over $2 billion last year alone … Hits Daily Double reported that she represented close to 2 percent of the total music market. Those are just staggering numbers. I didn’t approach her any differently than I would if I was writing a book about Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos. 

She’s an extremely talented songwriter, but she also has great business instincts. I don’t think you could scale your success to this level without having great entrepreneurial instincts.

b.: You compare her brand with American Girl dolls. They’re both situations where an established brand has succeeded while offering different iterations of itself.

Evers: There’s so many lessons from Taylor Swift. The biggest thing for me is how she’s always understood that it’s more than the music. It’s about forming deep connections with the fans. And not only that, but also validating their experiences, validating their emotions. 

Taylor Swift is uber-popular right now, but she’s faced a lot of backlash, too. She was a teen artist writing music for her peers — fellow teenagers — and that’s not always been taken seriously in pop culture. But she’s always doubled down on that. She has a very clear sense of who her audience is; she’s been able to adapt as she’s grown. 

What makes her a really interesting brand is she has managed to grow up with her fans. Every album seems to be a check-in between her and her fans, what’s going on in her life. Then her fans can relate that to their own lives. That makes her unique. 

b.: You write that Taylor has just the right amount of novelty — like how, when developing a new product, you want a little novelty but not too much. What’s the right balance?

Evers: It’s a really hard thing to do because that balance between familiarity and novelty is what makes the best pop music successful. There’s been studies about this. The best academic papers, the best pop songs have that perfect mix — and the perfect mix tends to be more on the familiar side. 

We’re comforted by what we hear. We can predict what’s going to happen next, but then there’s also something different about it. That’s really what lights up our minds, is the novelty. For Taylor Swift, that’s her sweet spot. She’s a very traditional songwriter. She writes great traditional melodies, and she works in traditional structures. But she has a way of surprising her audience — whether it’s through great unexpected lyrics or great sonic moments in her songs, we don’t expect it. Her bridges are a perfect example of this. We know the bridge is coming, but she always does something in those bridges to surprise us and to delight us. That’s part of her success.

In terms of other entrepreneurs, I think it’s something that people really need to really think about. I think a lot of us want to double down on novelty. We want something that really surprises people, that really catches their attention. If you look at the research, it’s really the familiarity that pulls us in.

b.: Taylor wasn’t able to drop 1989 as a surprise album in the way that Beyoncé did around the same time with her self-titled release. Can you expand on that a little? 

Evers: 1989 was a huge transition for Taylor Swift. It wasn’t just about replacing the banjos and the mandolins with ’80s-sounding synthesizers. For the longest time, she was able to have her cake and eat it too. She had country music, and she had pop music — but at this point, she was moving completely into pop music.

That’s a tough transition because she had built her brand around authenticity, around her vulnerable and intimate lyrics, around her deep relationships with her fans. By moving to full-on pop music and not making any country music, she was at risk of losing some fans.

At the time, a lot of musicians were really fighting for ways to grab people’s attention. U2 famously partnered with Apple, and all of a sudden we all woke up one morning and we had U2 on our phones. Jay Z did something similar with Samsung, and then Beyoncé at the time also surprise-released an album.

Since Taylor Swift was making such a big transition, and since she had built her career on these close relationships with her fans, she chose to do something differently. She decided to speak directly to her fans. She hosted a livestream that was simulcast on ABC and Yahoo — and she … said why she was making such a big shift. She framed her change in the language of personal growth and transformation. She’s very clear: “I’m changing as a person. My music is changing. So I really had to make this jump.”

That’s something Taylor Swift has always done really well. She’s not a type of artist that lets her art speak for itself. She really tries to communicate with her fans, and to really explain the changes that she makes. And that was pivotal during the 1989 era because she really needed her fans to go along for the ride, and most of them did. 

b.: Do you think she could have had the success that she had with 1989, going to this totally different genre, had she not first released the transitional album that was Red?

Evers: I don’t think so, because Red served to acclimate her fans. Red did have some big pop songs on it. So, by the time she got to 1989, it wasn’t a complete shock — and we’re more willing to accept her transformation from a pop country artist to a global pop star. I always say Taylor is good at surprising her fans but not shocking her fans. 

b.: You point out that Taylor was an artist who came of age in a time when Tumblr and platforms like that were also on the rise. Fifteen years later, the social media landscape has changed. Could an artist or brand have a similar relationship with their audience in that way?

Evers: I think so. Taylor Swift isn’t successful because of social media; she’s successful because of the way she’s used social media throughout her career. That need to use social media, or the prerequisite that you need to use social media to be successful, has only grown over the years. 

I think any artist starting out now needs to use social media in some way. And if they don’t, I don’t know how they’re going to directly connect with their audience.

What’s interesting, though, is that at this point in her career, Taylor Swift isn’t extremely online. She was our first extremely online superstar. She’s really used platforms — whether it was Myspace, Tumblr, Instagram and now TikTok — to great degrees, but she’s not as active as she used to be. The engagement has increased around her at the same time. She’s releasing more music, which increases engagement, yes, but also because of the rise of TikTok, there’s so much speculation about what she’s up to. 

Everything that she does now, everything she wears, is a source of speculation. Everything she says, every little message on social media is torn apart and speculated about. So she’s in this really interesting place in her career where she doesn’t have to engage as much. That lack of engagement is increasing the fan engagement.

b.: Was that shift a result of the Eras Tour?

Evers: I think the shift happened around 2020 during the pandemic. She went to an abundant content strategy where she was releasing more music at a faster clip than she ever has, and still scaled back on her social media presence. … She’s always encouraged fans to be co-creators in her story, co-creators in her mythology. TikTok just took that to the next level.

During the Eras tour, Swift was able to do things in her set list that increased engagement as well. She would change her outfits, she would change her surprise songs every night. The engagement on TikTok was pretty extreme. I saw a stat that at the height of the Eras Tour, each day fans were viewing 203 million videos of Taylor Swift …

She could have hosted her own livestreams — and fans would have paid a lot of money to see those shows. But she didn’t … because she understands the power of social media, and the power of social influence, better than most artists. She would have made a lot of money, but I don’t think the videos would have spread as far as they did. It was better that the fans had created those videos, and the fans were sharing those videos and that the fans were … building communities around those livestreams.

It reminded me a lot of what the Grateful Dead did back in the 1960s, where they encouraged fans to record shows and to share shows. That enabled fans to be more proactive participants in the band’s story and mythology. Swift is doing the same thing, except it’s updated for the TikTok age. 

b.: Did that strategy help with sales when she did release the polished version theatrically into AMC?

Evers: Taylor’s really good at thinking about the long term over the short term. … Her tickets were severely underpriced. If you look at the secondary market, people would have been willing to pay much more for the tickets, but she priced them reasonably. She didn’t do dynamic pricing. …

By pricing the tickets at a more reasonable level, fans were more willing to spend money in other places like merchandise. Fans would line up days before the show to buy merch. The Eras Tour concert film is the same thing — by holding off … she made that theatrical release a special experience for fans. 

b.: What do you think it says that she’s found so much success with the “Taylor’s Version” rerecords of her albums?

Evers: To be honest, it’s kind of a crazy idea to rerecord all your old music. It really shouldn’t work the way that it did, but her fans rallied behind those recordings. It goes back to the relationships that she’s built with those fans. 

b.: You discuss the ways that Taylor, over the course of her career, has had to adapt with the changing music industry. What lessons do you think entrepreneurs should take away from the way Taylor has adjusted to changing technologies?

Evers: The biggest thing is that she hasn’t shied away from those technologies. She’s waited them out, and then made pivots and changes based on what’s going on in the environment around her.

Streaming is a case in point: Taylor didn’t always have a great relationship with streaming. In 2014, she had very public spats with Spotify and Apple. She pulled her entire catalog from Spotify, but she didn’t need Spotify at the time. She could sell physical albums like it was the 1980s. [Taylor] was really the only artist who was doing that at the time … but that all changed around 2019. Streaming had grown exponentially, and she needed streaming. She shifted her strategy to release more music at a faster clip, which worked to a great degree. 

What businesses really need to watch out for is premium position captivity. When you really need to be paying attention is when you’re doing quite well — and this is what happened with Taylor Swift. She fell into this trap a bit, too, where she didn’t need streaming, so she didn’t really adjust her strategies … She had a premium position in the industry, but that tends to catch up with you eventually. It did catch up with Swift with her Lover album because she was caught flat-footed a bit. She really didn’t know how to navigate the new streaming age.

My advice would be [to] always be on the lookout — even when you’re doing really, really well — because you’re not always going to do really well. … There’s going to be a time when you need to adjust and adapt. The more you look out for those things, the better. 

b.: Last question, what’s your favorite Taylor Swift album? 

Evers: That’s a controversial question. It’s Reputation for me. That was the first album that drew me to Taylor Swift. It was a perfect mix of sinister and sweet. It reminded me of Bjork’s early albums, which I love. And I think it’s a pivotal moment in her career, that album … It really gave her a lot of creative freedom and flexibility, really pushed her to reinvent herself with every album after that.

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