You Belong With Me
(in This T. Swift Class)

Last spring, Kelly McCormick attended the second of three performances Taylor Swift gave in Houston, just the fifth city on the artist’s epic Eras Tour. McCormick, a professor of practice at the University of Houston C. T. Bauer College of Business, considered herself merely a casual Taylor Swift fan; the tickets were a gift. But the show made an immediate impression.

The professor began studying Swift’s career, analyzing the star’s business and marketing moves over the years. Meanwhile, Swift was blazing her way through a 100-plus shows on two continents — a tour that, by the time it wrapped in December, had earned a world-record $1 billion, landed her on the cover of TIME as the “Person of the Year” and affirmed her as a global business titan.

“I’m really interested in how she runs her brand as a business,” McCormick says.

McCormick was captivated and spent much of 2023 designing an undergraduate class she’s teaching this spring, “The Entrepreneurial Genius of Taylor Swift.” She aims to entice business students as well as those from other disciplines to consider the music mogul’s case study as they chase their own “wildest dreams.”

“I’m really interested in how she runs her brand as a business,” McCormick says.

Those key components include how Swift creates relationships, how she builds and compensates her team, how she controls her creative work and how she always makes her fans feel seen and appreciated.

“Fan engagement encompasses a lot: understanding your customers, providing value and then having a brand that speaks to the customers,” McCormick explains. “How can you do these things in other spaces? It’s really about how this could be applied in other businesses.”

Students may figure out how to apply Swift’s savvy tactics to their own careers. For instance: Having signed over the master recordings of her first six albums to the record label she joined as a teen — a move now seen as a blow for artists’ rights in the music industry — she has been re-recording new tracks of those records to regain financial and creative control of her music.

Not every budding entrepreneur will get the chance to upend economic power structures. But Swift, who’s now 34, also manages her brand and business in ways students can emulate. She routinely navigates thorny politics — such as her efforts to encourage voter registration and when she stumped for the removal of Confederate monuments in 2020. And she takes exceptional care of the people who work for her. At the end of the U.S. leg of her 2023 tour, she surprised her team with more than $55 million in bonuses to those working on her show — most notably each of the truck drivers on the Eras Tour received $100,000 bonus checks.

“Students do relate when they see people who are more authentic and more genuine,” McCormick says. “People can say what they want about giving those bonuses, but it’s truly showing how much she’s thinking of every component of her business and the people around her.”