The New Taylorism

As a book editor at Harvard Business Review Press, Kevin Evers routinely scouts for authors who can bring complex management topics to life. In early 2022 he was looking for a writer to tell the story of the music industry’s disruption, in which one example kept cropping up. In the previous two decades the industry’s distribution model had shifted from CDs to iTunes to streaming services like Spotify, and experts consistently pointed out how deftly Taylor Swift had navigated the changes, becoming more successful at every turn.