Crystal Haryanto blended her love of economics with her love of Taylor Swift to create a course at the University of California, Berkeley, but she didn’t expect the “passion project” to make her a published author before the age of 23.
“While I am in awe, this does feel like something I’ve somehow been preparing for my whole life,” she says over Zoom.
Haryanto’s course, “Artistry, Policy, & Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version,” returns to Berkeley for a fourth semester in the fall and follows the release of her first book: “The Glory of Giving Everything.”
The title is a play on words from a lyric in Swift’s song “Clara Bow”: “Take the glory, give everything.”
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“It’s a perfect line, because it traces the lineage of women in entertainment,” she says. “By accepting fame and prestige, there’s also this aspect where every part of your life is subjected to public consumption. You give your all to your craft, because if you don’t give your all — especially for Taylor and women in entertainment — you can easily be replaced. People will look for the next shiny thing.”
When Swift was on a break between European and North American legs of the Eras Tour in September 2024, Haryanto was approached by John Wiley & Sons to write a book.
She finished in four months, balancing a full-time job as an economic consultant along with being a part-time instructor at Berkeley. Sometimes, she would catch concert livestreams and listen to the crowd cheer, using the energy to fuel her writing.
“I would write into the wee hours of the morning,” she says. “But I loved it.”
Haryanto finished the manuscript just before her January birthday.
“I’m a Capricorn like Mama Swift,” she says. “I wish I could say I’m an aesthetic writer. I’m not. I would love to be in a coffee shop with a croissant and colorful highlighters. But I am the most boring, like you would pass me on my computer with spreadsheets and PowerPoint lesson plans and think, ‘This girl is doing her math homework.'”
‘Next chapter’
The book does not follow Swift’s eras chronologically; instead Haryanto ties economic concepts and business lessons to Swift’s career with a perfect, bedazzled bow.
For example, while explaining anticipatory utility (people feeling excitement before an event), experienced utility (enjoyment a person feels at an event or when consuming a product) and remembered utility (post-event excitement), Haryanto illustrates the concepts using the Eras Tour.
Before the concert, fans fought for tickets on Ticketmaster, booked flights, reserved hotel rooms and purchased outfits to wear to the show. At the tour, they spent hours waiting in line for concert merchandise. And following the tour, they listened to her songs, bought more merchandise, danced in movie theater and streamed the three hour adventure on Disney+.
“The Eras Tour reigned as the epitomized Taylor Swift Experience not only because of its experienced utility, but also for its intensified anticipatory and remembered utility,” she writes. “For some, the Eras Tour was folded into vacation plans. These fans attended in a city where tickets were more accessible, where they wanted to visit as a tour, or where they felt was important to Swift and predicted to be the bearer of extra surprises, such as Nashville or London, or opening or closing nights.”
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Haryanto also categorizes every single one of Swift’s songs. The self-proclaimed “Monica Geller from ‘Friends'” neatly organizes each track across six categories: pop formula, circular, wild card, surprise, stripped and pre/post extended pop formula.
“I had to think of Taylor’s songs as products,” she says. “If a song were a physical thing, like what would it be? How would you touch it? How would you break it apart?”
She also slips in clever nods. The page before chapter 2 reads “Next Chapter,” a wink to a lyric from “The Story of Us.” The epilogue contains a hidden acrostic message, echoing Swift’s early albums where secret phrases could be found in the liner notes.
‘We would’ve been timeless’
Haryanto is presenting the book at locations in California and working on expanding the book tour across the nation. A list of dates and locations can be found on thegloryofgivingeverything.com.
For the fans she meets who have purchased “The Glory of Giving Everything,” she personalizes each copy with a different lyric.
If she ever had the chance to hand a copy to Swift, she “would pen a lyric from my favorite song, ‘Timeless’: ‘In another life you still would’ve turned my head.'”
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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Berkeley instructor explains ‘Taylor Swift business model’ in new book
