The business of being Beyoncé
New HBS case study looks at the marketing savvy and tough calls behind star’s surprise 2013 album release
“Surprise!” Visitors browsing the Apple iTunes store just after midnight on Dec. 13, 2013, saw a startling image flicker across their screens. It was a music business stunner announcing that singer Beyoncé’s fifth solo album was available to download.
News of the recording, a self-titled set of 14 songs with 17 companion videos dubbed a “visual album,” caught music industry veterans and even her diehard fans off guard. Without advance publicity, a single to promote, or any music leaked to the Internet, Beyoncé managed to keep the project under wraps until she was ready to unveil it across 119 countries.
“Beyoncé has delivered countless surprises in her 15 years on top of the music world, but she’s never dropped a bombshell like this,” Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield wrote at the time. “The whole project is a celebration of the Beyoncé Philosophy, which basically boils down to the fact that Beyoncé can do anything the hell she wants to.”
A new Harvard Business School (HBS) case study to be published next week examines what it took to pull off the ambitious and costly campaign, the prevailing market conditions, the structural and technical obstacles, as well as the many difficult decisions Beyoncé and her management team confronted along the way. With insights from top executives at Parkwood Entertainment, Columbia Records, Facebook and Apple, the HBS case asks M.B.A. students to decide what they would have done if they were working for Beyoncé.
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http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...being-beyonce/
