It was probably the longest queue in history, if you count queuing online as queuing, and those of us who have done so know it can be at least as boring as the real thing. When Taylor Swift’s Eras tour came to Singapore, more than 22 million people tried to buy tickets; a million people waited simultaneously. The chance of making it to the show itself, for the average Singaporean Swiftie, was minimal. It was a story repeated across the globe as the tour reaped the rewards of the post-pandemic spending boom and the public’s lockdown-induced thirst for live events. The tour grossed more than $2bn; it would make Swift a billionaire, the most profitable live music act in history.
A new and not particularly serious discipline, Swiftonomics, was established to study the impact of the Eras tour, as fans and their money arrived in the cities it favoured over 21 months. It was estimated that in the UK, 1.2 million fans spent an average of £848 on tickets, travel, accommodation, and outfits; at face value, a VIP package ticket cost as much as £662.40. You could even skip the queue by signing up for a Capital One credit card (or by being Prime Minister). Among some fans was a sense that something had changed. Was Swift, with whom they had grown up with, whose songwriting came from the heart, whose battles with the men of the music industry they had followed for years – as vulnerable and honest as they had thought? Or was she in it for the money?
This isn’t a question that gets asked about male pop stars. Bono appears to have made at least as much money from private equity investment as he has from music, and U2’s fans don’t seem to mind. But Swift’s success, to her fans, is bound up with an impression that she is in some way more authentic.
The daughter of a financier, managed from her early teens by the man who had steered Britney Spears’ career, Swift became well known as a country singer before being introduced to the wider world by that most inauthentic of events: the televised awards ceremony. TV producers know that these events are excruciatingly dull, even for most of the people who attend them, and that the only way to ensure people take any notice of them is to orchestrate some controversy. Perhaps you seat a couple of feuding musicians at adjacent tables, or let some people have a bit too much to drink. The security staff might be instructed not to interfere with any celebrity in the process of creating a viral moment.
This was apparently the plan of the TV executive Vin Toffler, who was in charge of the MTV video music awards in 2009. Toffler later described his programming of the awards as a plan to “put the combustible elements in the room” and “occasionally light a match”. As part of this plan Toffler had spoken to the mother of the 17-year-old Swift, to reassure her that the ceremony would be fine (“I felt it might be,” he later reflected). Swift won an award and began making a speech, but the most combustible element Toffler had introduced was Kanye West, who walked on stage, grabbed the microphone from her hands and began yelling at the crowd that award should have gone to Beyoncé. The producers could not have been happier. “This is TV gold!” the show’s director exclaimed.
Swift was less thrilled. Although she had sold millions of albums, her videos were still played mostly on Country Music Television. She later said that when she heard the crowd booing West for his crass interruption, she assumed they were booing her. It is a grim industry that makes its money from the humiliation of teenage girls in front of tens of millions of viewers.
At the same time, however, the incident was a test of the formidable determination and self-belief that Swift had built as a performer since her early teens. At 13, she had been paired with professional songwriters as part of a deal with RCA Records but these writers, as Kevin Evers reports in There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift, his account of Swift’s strategic success, found themselves superfluous. Her plan was to write songs to which teenage girls would relate; the advice of male writers in their fifties was not needed.
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Swift had also decided that her “development deal” with RCA – a kind of record contract in which young artists are moulded into potential pop stars – was not how she wanted to release albums. In 2004 she left RCA and committed to a new record label, Big Machine, run by the promoter Scott Borchetta at a time when online file-sharing was dissolving the music industry. This was a gamble, but Borchetta had guaranteed that Swift would write all of her own songs. It helped that her father, another Scott, had invested $300,000 in Big Machine – a stake he would later sell for $15m.
Swift’s arrival seemed to be more than just the coronation of another teen pop star. Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake and others had been tested on the public by the Disney Channel, and their songs were written and focus-grouped by teams of professionals. Swift trusted her own talent, both for songwriting and for promotion; she was confidently appearing in radio and TV interviews at an age when many normal kids try to avoid talking to anyone. She seemed closer to Dolly Parton, whose songs she had begun covering and sending to record labels when she was 11. The two women are from very different backgrounds – Parton grew up on a subsistence farm with a single bedroom, Swift’s family was well-off – but they share an approach to work that is direct, personal, irresistibly nostalgic, and very much their own.
Of course, that didn’t stop other people from deciding that Swift’s music was also theirs. After her humiliation at the awards in 2009 became a global media event, Kanye West would claim “I made that bitch famous”. This wasn’t true; her records were already outselling his own. Other men in the music industry sought to define her music in their terms – the Guardian’s critic called her second album, Fearless, “bland and uninventive”; Slant magazine warned that she was “a terrible singer”. And eventually, the man to whom she entrusted her career as a young teenager, Scott Borchetta, would assert the legal right to sell the original versions of her first six albums for $140m.
But Swift did not seem to need the approval of the music press. Her early success was composed, in the parlance of the Harvard Business Review (of which Evers is a senior editor) of a relentless focus on her “core differentiators” – her songwriting, and the fact that she was a teenage girl, writing songs for teenage girls. Her fame was cultivated in the more stable and predictable country music market, which she did not immediately cast aside in favour of the larger pop audience. (This would have been “premature core abandonment”, a marketing error in which a company neglects its main business in favour of new opportunities.) The direct emotional appeal of her writing was a perfect fit for the direct emotional appeal of social media, on which she came to speak directly to a growing army of fans. At around the same time, Donald Trump was also enjoying the success that came from appealing directly to the emotions of social media users – only to different people, and using very different emotions.
Even the sale of her master recordings – to Scooter Braun, the man who managed Kanye West at the height of his feud with Swift – helped to cement her ability to make her personal story matter to her fans. The sale gave her permission to re-record each of her original albums (as a “Taylor’s Version”) in what was, depending on how you looked at it, the rescue of emotionally important artworks or the re-creation of assets for which other people had already paid.
One of the most durable jokes in the sitcom Peep Show is Mark Corrigan’s book, Business Secrets of the Pharaohs. Corrigan is a petty, frustrated man, pushed by his domineering father into taking business studies at university, who has wandered into a life of corporate drudgery rather than following his true love: history. He spends 45 episodes writing fatuous comparisons between the Nile irrigation system and viral marketing until the work is finally printed, badly, by a vanity publisher; he plans a follow-up on “Napoleon and the internet”.
A mean review of There’s Nothing Like This might draw a parallel with Business Secrets of the Pharaohs, in that it has a weird premise: to reveal the hidden strategy of someone so far removed from the reader’s experience that they could not possibly hope to emulate them. If there’s a business secret Taylor Swift personifies, it is this: you can go a long way if you’re prodigiously talented and hard-working, if you physically embody the Western standard of beauty, and if you’ve been born to a wealthy family who will put your success before everything else in their lives. Thanks for the tip!
That said, there are good lessons to be learned from Swift’s career. Interrogate every opportunity, however good it looks; don’t wait for permission to do the work you want to do. But this book is perhaps most interesting when Evers admits for a moment that he can’t really say what makes Swift historically successful, and simply admires the effect she has on his daughter, Maisie. He watches as she listens, “lost in thought and emotion, absorbing every lyric and every note” in Swift’s music on a car journey, he thrills at the “delight and wide-eyed marvel” on her face when he takes her to her first Swift concert. The “unspoken connection” his daughter feels to Swift is, he briefly admits, a “mystery”. There is a truth in there about successful art: we know when it’s working, but we can’t say how.
There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift
Kevin Evers
Harvard Business Review Press, 304pp, £24
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025