There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift, reviewed

We look at this Harvard Business Review Press book about Taylor Swift. For more about the book, see here.

There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift, reviewed

This book is certainly readable. As someone who is aware of who she is, knows a few songs, and has teenagers who may have even gone to see her in concert there are reasons why this book was of potential interest for reviewing. The author also cites a lot of business management and thoughtful marketing thinkers too, Clayton Christiansen and Seth Godin yes we are talking about you here. Similarly words like pivot and pilot are used with business dev enthusiasm. This is all fine and dandy, but, as we read it, it was hard not to wonder if this was an attempt to shoehorn the career of Taylor Swift into a startup ethos vibe.

The other question, and challenge in reading this narrative, was that, were we looking at Taylor Swift’s career through the prism of a confirmation bias. She was, now is, wildly successful for sure, but does that mean that all of her albums, and her musical steps, and decisions made were actually that strategic or as carefully considered as the subtitle of this book would like us to think? As Bill Gates may have said, success can be a lousy teacher. All the more so when you consider musical careers. Lou Reed was an awful grump and cranky guy, if many accounts are to be believed, the Velvet Underground were both wildly unsuccessful first time around, and yet created some great songs and are considered to be one of the seminal and most important bands to have come out of the sixties. Was this therefore a clever strategic performance, or did they, eventually, stumble onto fame and fortune. Walk on the wild side and Waiting for my Man would hardly be obvious topics towards musical stardom.

Coming back to Taylor, the book was informative, interesting, but the business analogies felt a bit clunky at times. Many fans felt that The Tortured Poets Department was a good single, or perhaps double album, lost in a triple. It would have been good to see how the author factored in this mishmash of an album in the slightly breathless prose of her faultless strategic rise to the top? Perhaps the classic result of so many triples, like Sandanista for example, so great songs, mixed in with some slightly to very odd ones too. This book might fall between too stools, not Taylor enough for TS fans, and a bit of a reach for business insights for those coming from  a business or marketing background.

More about the book here

A smart, page-turning exploration of the business and creative decisions that transformed Taylor Swift into an unprecedented modern cultural phenomenon. Singer-songwriter. Trailblazer. Mastermind. The Beatles of her generation. From her genre-busting rise in country music as a teenager to the economic juggernaut that is the Eras Tour, Taylor Swift has blazed a path that is uniquely hers. But how exactly has she managed to scale her success–multiple times–while dominating an industry that cycles through artists and stars like fashion trends? How has she managed to make and remake herself time and again while remaining true to her artistic vision? And how has she managed to master the constant disruption in the music business that has made it so hard for others to adapt and endure?

In “There’s Nothing Like This,” Kevin Evers, a senior editor at “Harvard Business Review,” answers these questions in riveting detail. With the same thoughtful analysis usually devoted to iconic founders, game-changing innovators, and pioneering brands, Evers chronicles the business and creative decisions that have defined each phase of Swift’s career. Mixing business and art, analysis and narrative, and pulling from research in innovation, creativity, psychology, and strategy, “There’s Nothing Like This” presents Swift as the modern and multidimensional superstar that she is–a songwriting savant and a strategic genius. Swift’s fans will see their icon from a fresh perspective. Others will gain more than a measure of admiration for her ability to stay at the top of her game. And everyone will come away understanding why, even after two decades, Swift keeps winning.

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