Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl is launched and irrespective of whether you call yourself a Swiftie or not, here is the thing: Taylor Swift’s genius is not limited to her singing and songcraft.
As the founder of her own multi-billion dollar enterprise she has higher returns than 99.9% of hedge funds, and has built a stronger global corporation than nearly every other American conglomerate CEO.
She is the only person that the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank track with precision.
She has a larger impact on the world economy than most economists that have ever lived, and has done more for US antitrust law than any sitting member of Congress.
There is a lot to learn from Taylor Swift.
Global investment fund manager and former head of Strategy at HBS (and Swiftie!) Sinead O’Sullivan taps into the same genius that sells out stadiums and shuts down the internet to give Taylor―the CEO, the strategist―the respect she deserves. O’Sullivan sums up Swift’s business savvy into ten big, teachable lessons in the latest book Good Ideas and Power Moves: Ten Lessons for Success from Taylor Swift, including:
Build a World (Not a Product): how to create value that is greater than the sum of its parts (or, how Taylor created the fan-centered Swiftverse that fosters community, belonging, and off-the-charts engagement)
Be Anti-Fragile: how to embrace volatility, build resilience, and thrive in uncertainty–when your competitors can’t (or, how Taylor gamed the chaos of Covid shutdown to own the airwaves)
Don’t Just Play the Game, Change It: how to rewrite the rules on your own terms when your chips are down (or, how Taylor almost lost control of her music catalog to Private Equity―but re-recorded all her masters and took them back)
How Taylor Swift made herself anti-fragile
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Key decisions or actions taken by Taylor Swift that demonstrate her antifragility, which is the quality of systems, organizations, or people that not only survive chaos but actually grow stronger from disorder and stress.
These destructive paths, which would typically cause other artists or businesses to fail, instead made Taylor Swift and the Swiftverse stronger.
The four key moments highlighting her antifragility are:
Withdrawing Her Music from Spotify (2014): Taylor pulled her music from Spotify, the fastest-growing streaming platform at the time, arguing that the service’s compensation model unfairly devalued artists’ work. This decision, which many considered “fatal” for an artist aiming to be the most listened-to in the world, defied intuitive wisdom.
The Antifragile Outcome: Instead of harming her, this move made her stronger. By withdrawing her music, she became an exclusive, “luxury good,” and the difficulty of accessing her music led fans to crave her and create an even stronger bond with her. When she returned to the platform in 2017, she immediately amassed nearly forty-eight million streams, demonstrating that the move did not kill her but actually strengthened her position.
Engaging in Feuds with Other Musicians and Public Figures (Beefing): Throughout her career, particularly during the lengthy and complex feud with Kanye West and supporting figures, the more Taylor was publicly criticized or “beaten down,” the more fiercely her fan base rallied around her.
The Antifragile Outcome: This conflict led to “extravagantly higher levels of emotional connection” between Taylor and her fans within the Swiftverse. Because her public image is that of the ultimate underdog who doesn’t start fights but throws a “clean right hook to finish them,” the beef reinforced her relatability as someone dealing with the same professional battles (powerful men taking advantage of less powerful women) that her core female demographic faces in their own lives. Fighting these fires actually served to help her grow.Releasing Multiple Albums During the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020): While the global music industry largely stalled in 2020 due to the pandemic, forcing artists to cancel tours and delay releases, Taylor Swift embraced the lockdown to create and release two surprise full-length albums (folklore and evermore) in the same year.
The Antifragile Outcome: She was able to “Amazon herself” because she controlled her own value chain and had unique access to the music supply chain (e.g., a studio in her house and access to A-list collaborators). Since she owned and controlled her distribution via the Swiftverse, she could continue to deliver core products to a market that had virtually no competition for new material. This meant she sprinted up a hill (volatility) when everyone else was struggling, allowing her to win a deepened sense of friendship with her fans, who were consuming her music with 100% of their time, energy, and money.Rerecording Her Master Albums (Taylor’s Versions): This was the decision to rerecord her first six studio albums after the ownership of the original masters was sold to a company owned by Scooter Braun. This choice forced her to constantly be pulled back into the studio to recreate decade-old music, a wildly risky move with high effort and minimal guaranteed payout that industry analysts bet against.
The Antifragile Outcome: For Taylor, this lengthy and expensive ordeal did not suck the oxygen out of her career; the opposite occurred. It was a crisis that allowed her to call upon and strengthen the relationship she had built with her fans. Her tenacity and deep love for her catalog, combined with the fan base’s support, reduced the value of the original masters and propelled her career further. Her chips were down in the “real world,” but her chips were up in the Swiftverse, heightening fan support.
So yeah..you are a Swiftie now? :)
