USC’s Marshall School of Business will launch an MBA course built entirely around Beyoncé’s career, the Los Angeles Times reported. The class, titled “The Business of Beyoncé,” will dissect how the superstar has built and protected one of entertainment’s most valuable personal brands, spanning music, fashion, branding, and entertainment ventures.
The course, set to begin in January 2027, is taught by professor Shaun Harper, who told interviewers he wants students to study the decision-making behind a career that has few parallels in modern business. Coverage in outlets including the Los Angeles Times and syndicated descriptions of the syllabus point to case studies drawn from album rollouts, touring economics, the Ivy Park licensing history, brand partnerships, and the singer’s ownership structure across her recorded music and publishing assets.
Beyoncé’s business record makes for unusually rich teaching material. Across four decades she has moved from group member to sole proprietor of one of the most valuable catalogs in music, renegotiated distribution to streaming-era advantage, and used surprise-release strategies that reset industry assumptions about launch windows. Her touring operations rank among the highest-grossing of all time, and her brand extensions — from fragrances to the athleisure partnership that eventually wound down — offer real lessons in licensing control, partner selection, and knowing when to exit.
The academic trendline is clear. Business schools have spent a decade courting applicants with pop-culture casework, from courses on Taylor Swift’s touring economics to seminars on the business of hip-hop. The bet is not that students will manage a pop star, but that celebrity enterprises compress every hard problem in modern business — intellectual property, direct-to-consumer channels, social-media distribution, reputation management, and capital allocation — into a single analyzable entity.
For Los Angeles, the course is also a reminder of how central the region’s entertainment complex remains to its economic identity, even as the industry contracts. The city’s film and television employment has been sliding for three years, but the business infrastructure around music, touring, brand management, and creator enterprises continues to concentrate here. Marshall’s positioning inside that ecosystem is deliberate: the school markets its entertainment and sports business programs as pipelines into labels, agencies, and studios, and a course analyzing a music-industry empire fits that recruiting pitch.
USC is not the first school to teach the singer’s playbook, but the depth of the syllabus distinguishes it. Reporting indicates the class will examine how Beyoncé has controlled her narrative through carefully managed communications, how she structures philanthropy through BeyGOOD, and how tour merchandising and streaming exclusives feed a broader commercial flywheel.
Enrollment interest is likely to be fierce, and Harper’s profile — he also leads USC’s Race and Equity Center — suggests the course will fold in questions about ownership, equity, and who captures value in entertainment, not just how revenue is generated. That combination of pop-culture draw and serious management analysis is precisely the formula schools have found moves the needle with Gen Z and millennial MBA candidates deciding between programs.
Whether the course becomes a permanent fixture or a one-off elective, it signals where business education’s center of gravity is drifting: toward the creator and celebrity economy as a legitimate field of study, taught from Los Angeles, where much of it is run.
