Taylor Swift is on an unprecedented run. Her Eras Tour, which spanned 149 shows, earned more than US$2 billion in revenue – the highest-grossing tour of all time.

Her most recent studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, accumulated twice as many streams and sales in 2024 as the next most popular album. And, according to HITS Daily Double, that same year she alone accounted for nearly two percent of the United States recorded-music market.

This kind of dominance might suggest a perfectly smooth trajectory, but in reality, Swift’s record-breaking success was preceded by a strategic inflection point.

A victim of her own success

Swift’s current dominance wouldn’t have been possible if she hadn’t navigated out of a tough spot in 2019 after the release of her seventh studio album, Lover. It was a spot many highly successful brands and companies, who’ve experienced a long run of success, find themselves in: premium position captivity. Or, to put it more simply, it’s called being the victim of your own success.

The warning signs were subtle but meaningful.

Using just about any metric to gauge Swift’s success – reputation, commercial performance, critical response and Grammy nods – the Lover era was lackluster. In fact, it was arguably Swift’s least successful era.

It wasn’t a flop; most artists would kill for that kind of ‘disappointment’. But for a superstar like Swift, with her ambitions to always get better and who had said that sales and awards served as a kind of quality and impact barometer, it was a disappointment.

By the numbers, the Lover album looked strong upfront – but it didn’t have the staying power of her previous releases. Though Lover sold 867,000 equivalent album units in its first week, making it the bestselling week for any album by any artist since her own album Reputation two years earlier, its long-term numbers underperformed her previous five albums. It was her lowest seller since her eponymous debut.

This dip highlighted a larger issue: Swift’s time-tested formula for releasing and promoting albums was no longer delivering outsized results.

For years, Swift had managed to turn each album into a cultural event, even as music and the entertainment industry splintered into thousands of niches. But times had changed.

“As the pop music landscape has shifted over and over again this decade, major artists have repeatedly attempted to reinvent the album release for a digital time,” the New York Times’ Joe Coscarelli wrote when Lover was released.

“And then there is Taylor Swift, steady in her traditional pop playbook, with radio singles, music videos, magazine covers, television appearances and a stream of things for sale, all on schedule.”

This is a textbook example of premium position captivity – a brand relying too long on what worked before.

Going against the stream

Research has shown that premium position captivity can occur when a brand has maintained a competitive edge for an extended period, a time when there’s little reason to question its strategies. However, this can become a trap. If a brand is too focused on exploiting its premium position, it may not respond quickly enough to changing customer behaviors or preferences.

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In fact, her success in traditional album sales may have masked just how far the streaming revolution had advanced.

For someone who had built her career on adapting to and embracing change – like her early and continued use of social media and her trailblazing fan engagement strategies – Swift seemed to have missed a new development that was reshaping the landscape: streaming.

For years, Swift had been mostly insulated from this massive industry shift; in fact, more insulated than many since she was such a powerhouse in selling physical albums compared to many of her peers. Since the start of the 1989 era in 2014, she’d even adopted an antagonistic stance toward streaming – a common response from market leaders to new competitive threats.

But by 2019, streaming wasn’t a threat, it was the dominant distribution model. By the time of Lover, Spotify and other streamers like Apple Music were no longer what Swift had once referred to as “a bit like a grand experiment”. Streaming had become the number one mode for music listening and discovery.

Between 2014, when Swift pulled her music from streaming services, and 2020, when the Lover era was in full swing, Spotify’s paid subscriber base had increased from 15 million to 124 million users – a growth rate of 726 percent.

Swift could sell albums like no one else and still can; she accounts for a significant portion of all vinyl sales. But during Lover, streaming was becoming the prime place to do business. It provided a more accurate depiction of the competitive landscape than album sales. One way to look at the relative nadir of the Lover era was that Swift was losing market share to artists who had adapted to streaming more quickly.

In business terms, her product was still excellent, but her channel strategy was out of date. As streaming took hold, her response was inadequate. To survive and thrive, she needed a strategic overhaul.

That meant reevaluating the entire release model and listening closely to what streaming platforms were optimizing for.

Failing to listen to the market

Mainly, Swift had to adjust to changing listener expectations. Daniel Ek, Spotify’s Co-Founder, stated at an industry event in 2020 that the traditional model of releasing music as periodic album drops was losing its purchase. According to Ek, streaming favored rapid and constant consumption of new music, from which an album may become the culminating moment.

“The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans. It is about putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans,” Ek said.

Much of his description sounded a lot like Swift’s strategies. The fan engagement, the hard work and the storytelling. These were the things she’d been doing better than anyone for close to 15 years.

But Swift had been missing one critical piece. Ek called it “a continuous dialogue with your fans”, which in the streaming age meant a constant flow of new content.

And the top streaming artists were already operating this way. Take Drake, Swift’s labelmate at Republic Records. The Canadian rapper had been among the top five most streamed artists since 2015. Music journalist Kriss Thakrar crunched the numbers, revealing that Drake released 200 new tracks between 2015 and 2023. Thakrar noted that this averaged to a new song every 16 days.

Over the span of eight years, Swift, on the other hand, released 46 tracks across three albums – 1989, Reputation and Lover. In other words, Swift was precious while Drake was prolific.

Finding a rhythm

After Lover, Swift radically changed her release strategies.

In just 15 months, from Lover, Swift put out two new studio albums and released 49 tracks (including bonus tracks), which averages out to about a track every week and a half.

She didn’t stop there and soon after released the first of her rerecordings, Fearless (Taylor’s Version). That made three albums in less than 12 months, with all three landing atop the Billboard 200 – the first time for a female artist.

And then, she followed that up with Red (Taylor’s Version), which also reached number one. Whatever reservations she may have had with streaming or faster-moving releases were gone. Even though they were rerecords, she added extra tracks too.

Between the two Taylor’s Version albums, Swift released an additional 57 new songs. Since then, she has released two more recordings and two more studio albums.

By embracing the realities of the streaming age and switching up her release strategies, she has not only regained her foothold but also expanded her influence. The remarkable success of her recent projects is a testament to her ability to learn from challenges and pivot with agility rather than remaining stagnant.

Opinions expressed by The CEO Magazine contributors are their own.