Taylor 'business' Swift

Very interesting books are being published about the Taylor Swift phenomenon. Curiously, some of these texts are not simple biographies or musical essays, but are written from a business perspective. This summer I devoured There's Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift , by Kevin Evers and published by Harvard Business Review Press. The author's idea is that the American singer's success can be attributed to her enormous artistic talent, of course, but also to her ability to turn everything she touches into gold—that is, to orchestrate brilliant promotional and marketing campaigns that are making her one of the most famous and richest artists of all time. It is estimated that if Taylor Swift had wanted to please all her fans who wanted to see her live, she would have had to give around 900 concerts, which would have meant touring for two and a half years at a rate of one show a day. An outrage.

What might be some of the reasons for her extraordinary success? Taylor Swift, guided largely by her intuition but also by listening to her collaborators, has always known how to make big, risky, yet brave decisions. After the enormous disappointment she experienced when Big Machine Records, her first record label, through Scott Borchetta (the manager who had launched her to success), sold the rights to her albums to Ithaca Holding (which were subsequently resold to Shamrock Holdings), the singer had the good sense and courage to re-record almost all of them, making some changes to the tracks, which were then labeled as Taylor's Version , thus becoming the owner of her music and devaluing the previous versions. A master move that has undoubtedly contributed to her reputation as a shrewd businesswoman.

On another note, Taylor Swift understood like no one else that her true job wasn't so much composing and performing songs, but rather feeling the heartbeat of her millions of fans and working for them. In that sense, and for many years, the author of Shake it Off dedicated a lot of time to interacting with her followers so she could write the music and lyrics for her songs, capturing the desires of thousands or millions of teenagers and young people around the world (the Swifties ) and creating different complicities. I wish many businesses knew how to listen much better to their potential users so they could innovate with greater knowledge of the facts.

Another key concept to understanding Taylor Swift's success is that she is an anti-fragile character, or someone whose problems, crises, and failures help her to continually improve and reinvent herself. Far from being locked into a fixed idea of ​​herself, Swift has created new personas throughout her different eras that have allowed her to exploit and explore at the same time. She has managed to maintain a fan base since she began as a country singer and, through progressive experimentation, include new followers from the world of pop and even indie. Many business failures result from a failure to know how to combine exploitation (what we do well) with exploration (what new things could we do, and how?).

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Taylor Swift practices what some experts call "deliberate rumination," that is, knowing how to pause for reflection in the face of any challenging circumstance and reflect deeply on its effects and consequences. Through positive impacts, such as collaborations with artists of other persuasions or forced confinement during the pandemic, the author of "Blank Space" has managed to create different versions of herself, always adapting to changing times and the desires of her millions of fans.

Taylor Swift is much more than an artist: she's a cultural icon, someone who inspires passions around the world, and someone who doesn't settle for just anything. Just a few days ago, she announced the imminent release of her new album , *The Life of a Showgirl *. More like it.