Sometimes it can feel like we all work for Beyoncé. Now, Harvard Business School is institutionalizing that experience with a new class unit that asks students to “decide what they would have done if they were working for Beyoncé,” according to the Harvard Gazette.
Anita Elberse, a professor who teaches marketing strategies, co-wrote a case study on the artist that she will teach in her class “Strategic Marketing in Creative Industries.” The case, published on Tuesday, instructs MBAs to think about how they would have handled the surprise 2013 release of Beyoncé’s most recent album. For your convenience, we’ve distilled the 27-page trove of business insights to its most essential numbers.
The approximate time Beyoncé, the album, dropped on Dec. 13, 2013.
Times the album was downloaded in the U.S. in the first three days it became available, making it the “fastest selling album ever on the iTunes Store,” according to Apple.
The cost of the album, enough to preclude a “good ass lunch,” as one fan noted.
Songs that it took to convince Facebook (FB) to help Beyoncé quietly launch the album. Her team played XO and Drunk in Love for Facebook strategist Charles Porch. “The songs really blew us away,” he said. Facebook set the videos to autoplay on people’s newsfeeds and took on the cost of an advertising campaign on the site.
Songs Beyoncé originally recorded for the album, which she whittled down to 14 songs and 17 videos.
Number of collaborators Beyoncé invited to her rented Hamptons home to work on the album in the summer of 2012: Hit-Boy, Sia, and The-Dream. “She had five or six rooms going, each set up as a studio, and would go from room to room and say things like ‘I think that song needs that person’s input.’ Normally you would not see songs have two or more producers,” said Lee Anne Callahan-Longo, the general manager at Beyoncé’s production company, Parkwood Entertainment, according to the case study.
Hours that Beyoncé can spend in a business meeting before she starts pacing impatiently, according to Callahan-Longo. Once that happens, she said, “I can see it then—that I’ve lost her.”
Apple’s (AAPL) estimated share of the market for paid music downloads in the U.S. The company’s powerful position in the industry is why Beyoncé decided to launch the album exclusively on iTunes.
Number of songs downloaded from the iTunes Store each minute, according to Apple in 2013.
People employed by Parkwood Entertainment, including “an archivist who is in charge of collecting Beyoncé’s photos, videos, and audio tracks,” according to Parkwood’s marketing chief, Jim Sabey.
The amount of fear that Beyoncé has, according to Sabey. “She is sure enough of her own place in the artistic pendulum that she is willing to take risks.”
