An ecstatic seventeen-year-old Taylor Swift had just received her first MTV Video Music Award in front of a large screaming audience of music stars and fans, when the popular singer Kayne West walked on stage, grabbed her mike, and announced that she didn’t deserve it. He said Beyonce should have got it instead because she had a better album. Shocked, Taylor stood there for a few awkward minutes and then gingerly walked off the stage without completing her acceptance speech. Such a dramatic turn of events would have broken any teenager or a lesser artist, but not Taylor Swift. She came back with a vengeance creating better and better music over the years, winning many new fans on her way to 30 VMA awards, 16 Grammys, 118 Guinness World Records and many more. As the richest singer on the planet with over a billion dollars in earnings from music, nearly 300mn followers worldwide and 105mn listeners on Spotify every month, she’s a phenomenon like no other. A musical juggernaut As a singer-songwriter, she’s blazed a trail since her debut as a country music singer to single-handedly create an economic juggernaut, the Eras tour, last year. Harvard Business Review’s Editor, Kevin Evers’s new book, There’s Nothing Like This, details the incredible genius of Taylor Swift, the strategies she followed over the last 25 years to stay relevant, to stay connected with her ever growing fans and to stay on top. One wonders why would HBR do a book on a singer? A quick search for biographies on the HBR website showed this is the first one. Evers book makes the cut, perhaps, because he presents her life and achievements as a case study of good business strategy. Taylor’s tenacity was evident quite early. At the age of thirteen, she refused to sign up with a popular music label only because they didn’t let her write her own songs and wanted her to work with a creative team. She, instead, signed up with a new label. The most known thing about her music is that the lyrics of her songs reflect the key incidents of her life. Her song writings – full of desire, romance, deep despair, sadness, and hope - are inspired from each of her romantic relationships. She is often accused of weaponising her music to get back at her exes, but over time, Kevin observes that Taylor has developed a remarkable ability to use criticism as fuel. Country Beginnings The demonstration of Taylor’s strategic thinking is evident right from one of her earliest songs, Tim Mc Graw, that she wrote. McGraw was a popular country singer and Taylor used the singer’s name in the title of her song, which was about a couple who fall in love and are separated now but are pained and haunted whenever they hear McGraw’s song since it was their favorite song and it reminded them of their wonderful time together. When the song became a hit, McGraw was amused and in a radio interview, complimented Taylor for her business acumen. Marketing Skills Kevin lists examples of how Taylor uses great marketing skills to engage and grow her fans, who call themselves Swifties. For her first album, she met over five thousand fans, signing autographs and even today, adds personal comments on her fans’ social media posts. For her album Reputation, she deleted her website and social media accounts before the release of the theme song ‘Look what you made me do’ to create massive fan hysteria before the launch. When she signed up for Spotify, Taylor created a viral impact by dropping her song quietly without any announcement. Even as she follows a ‘less is more’ promotional strategy, she delivers more songs in every performance with a ‘more is more’ content strategy. Country to pop One of the most strategic shifts Taylor did was transition from a Country music singer to Pop music artist after she realised that her target group had grown up and needed to be adapted into the new sounds of Pop. Having built a large base of country music fans, how Taylor managed to pivot to Pop music, risking her conservative traditional fan base is a brilliant case study and Kevin does a wonderful job of detailing this in painstakingly researched chapters with a song-by-song analysis of her transition. In 2014, Taylor removed all her songs from Spotify and Apple when she realised that their ad-supported free tier wouldn’t get her any money with their limited number of paying subscribers. Besides, her vinyl sales continued to clock big numbers. But in a few years, she realised that streaming was getting bigger by the day as more and more people tuned to music online. Streaming removed the limits on number of songs possible in physical records, expanded the infinite number of fans meet and greets she could do, helped her grow her geographic appeal beyond the US and Europe and learn how some other artists were collaborating remotely to create new music. A global crescendo Evers outlines how Taylor strategically used streaming to become the viral phenomenon she has become. From Dua Lupa, she learnt how to create virtual events, from Ed Sheeran, she learnt how to go global, from Drake she learnt how to churn a new song every week, from Aaron Dressner, she learnt to create Indie music and from Beyonce how to release a new song digitally, whipping up fans appetite and creating a huge demand. In 2016, Kanye West released a video called ‘Famous’ with the lyrics ‘I made the bitch famous’ alluding to the fact that his VMA act had helped in Taylor’s rise over the years. But Taylor had the last laugh last year, when her Eras tour generated over 1.50 billion dollars in ticket sales through 152 shows on five continents and generated 10 billion dollars of indirect income in the cities the shows were hosted in, more than double what the London Olympics had generated for London, earning her the tag of ‘Beatles’ of this generation. The book is a gem. It straddles effectively between strategic analysis and personal narrative and with riveting detail outlines her journey from a teenager to a cultural phenomenon. Taylor says her only regret is that she doesn’t have anyone in her life to give a hi-five to when she achieves another milestone or someone to go home to after a hard day’s work. That, I think, looks like the theme of her next album! About the book You can find the book here. (Naveen Chandra runs 91 Film Studios that produces and distributes regional language feature films.) Published on July 22, 2025