Taylor Swift's Successful Business

Taylor Swift makes money professionally in the entertainment industry thanks to her own strategies in human resources, marketing, building customers and constantly innovating.

At 33, pop star Taylor Swift is one of the world's most influential entertainment business leaders, according to the WSJ .

She controls the copyrights to her songs instead of the music labels, is willing to take on the giants like Spotify, and sells record numbers of albums. She maintains the loyalty of her fans by chatting with them online.

Taylor Swift's tours have been so popular that online ticketing system Ticketmaster has been overwhelmed and crashed its website. Her "Eras Tour" is now predicted to be the biggest tour of all time, with the potential to gross over a billion dollars.

While other stars like Rihanna are actively making money in many other fields, Taylor Swift focuses on the entertainment industry. Below are some management lessons that WSJ has summarized from Swift's failures and successes.

Taylor Swift arrives at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards on February 5 in Los Angeles. Photo: AP

Lean Team

While many artists in the music industry outsource their business operations, Swift prefers to run them herself. Her company, 13 Management, has a lean staff and is supported by close family and a few confidants.

She typically avoids hiring outside managers, brokers, and lawyers to save on operating costs, while the company’s offices are housed in her private jet hangar in Nashville, Tennessee.

Go from basic to complex

At age 11, while her mother and younger brother waited in the car, Swift knocked on the doors of every record label in Nashville to try out a karaoke CD of her. When that failed to generate interest, Swift bought a 12-string guitar and practiced for hours every day.

Along the way, she began writing songs. Two years later, her original songs helped land her a development deal with RCA Records.

Seize the opportunity

Before releasing an album, unknown country artists often play on as many as 200 radio stations across the United States, as ratings from these stations help them chart. If a song gets a lot of airplay, it will continue to climb the charts, prompting the record label to release the rest of the album.

Rick Barker, who took Swift on the first leg of her 2006 radio tour and later became her manager, said the arduous journey can be demoralizing and taxing for many artists.

During a performance at K-FROG radio in Riverside, California, Barker was reminded not to bother busy program directors about getting Swift on the air.

However, when playing "Tim McGraw" in the station's studio, when the lyrics "someday you'll turn on your radio" came up, Swift glanced at Barker and changed the lyrics to "someday you'll turn on K-FROG". Her quick thinking paid off, and the station immediately wanted to introduce Swift to listeners.

Taylor Swift performs "Tim McGraw" at the 2007 Academy of Country Music Awards. Photo: AP

Building and mobilizing audiences

Swift built her fan base online early on, first on Myspace, then Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok. The platforms allowed her to get her music to her favorite listeners faster than the radio. “When she saw people on Myspace, she saw it as a venue. She was playing to thousands of fans every night,” Barker says.

During a commercial break at K-FROG, Swift announced to her fans on Myspace that she would be on the station. The station's phone lines were then flooded with calls thanking them for playing Swift's song.

Swift's pioneering use of social media is now seen as key to the artist-consumer relationship. "The way she uses technology to create authentic connections with her fans has shaped the modern music industry in many ways," commented Lucian Grainge, CEO of Universal Music Group, Swift's record label and publisher.

Take care of your partner

CEOs, radio programmers and other business partners describe Swift's keen memory for details about their spouses and children. They say they still keep her handwritten thank-you cards.

Several people close to Swift said she or a member of her team would save important information about a partner for Swift and everyone else to review before they met again the next time.

Tom Poleman, iHeartMedia's head of broadcasting, describes Swift as knowing where everyone she meets left off in their last conversation. "It's remarkable to do that at such a young age — to be involved in building relationships not only with listeners but also with business partners," he says.

Keep yourself fresh

A big part of Swift's lasting power is reinvention, according to music executives. No two records are the same, and no two shows are the same, says Rod Essig, Swift's agent in the early years. "People are fascinated by that," he says.

When Swift decided to release her first true pop album, she invited them to "Secret Sessions," held at her various homes, where she played unreleased songs from her album "1989." The album catapulted Swift to new heights in sales and fame.

Create leverage for yourself

When sales spiked weeks after the release of "1989" in 2014, Swift pulled the entire song from the music platform Spotify. She fought the music giant, demanding that Spotify only make "1989" available to paying listeners.

“Things of value should be paid for,” she wrote in an op-ed for the WSJ . “In my view, music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will one day decide how much an album costs,” she opined.

To repair the relationship, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek flew to Nashville multiple times to talk to Swift. But it wasn't until three years later, before the release of her album "Reputation," that she agreed to re-release the songs on Spotify. By then, "1989" had sold 10 million copies worldwide. Avoiding a free release helped boost those sales.

"I don't think Spotify did anything to convince Taylor. She's very independent and makes a lot of her own decisions," Ek commented. Recognizing that she had a huge audience on Spotify, Swift did not release Reputation on streaming services for the first three weeks of its release to maximize sales. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart, selling 41% more copies than the combined total of 199 other albums.

Breaking precedent

In 2018, Swift signed a deal with Universal that allowed her to own any music she recorded. But her first six albums were still on her independent label, Big Machine. Despite repeated attempts, she was unable to buy back the rights to them. So she decided to re-release new versions to get the rights herself.

And the result is something no other artist has ever done with such success. Swift adds unreleased songs to albums and encourages fans to buy the new versions.

She urged fans to join in, explaining why ownership matters. Streaming services and radio stations also embraced the move, replacing older versions of albums copyrighted by Big Machine with new versions owned by Swift. According to a WSJ analysis, new versions of albums like “Fearless” and “Red” even outsold their older versions by a margin of 3 to 1.

Phien An ( according to WSJ )

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