Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Taylor Swift’s Eras tour made $2.1bn in sales, making it the highest-earning concert run in history and capping off two years of financial and cultural domination for the pop star.
The figure covers 10mn tickets sold across 149 shows, said a person familiar with the matter. Swift completed the tour with a final performance on Sunday night in Vancouver, Canada.
The $2.1bn sum is double that of any other concert tour in history. It surpassed Elton John’s five-year farewell tour that grossed $939mn from more than 300 shows, and Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres that has sold more than $1bn across some 170 dates.
The huge sales figure does not include money made by resellers on the secondary market, where seats fetched thousands of dollars above their face value, or for merchandise sold at the concerts.
Swift recently published a book of photos from the Eras tour that quickly eclipsed most major releases from professional publishers. The Eras tie-in book, which is available only through the retailer Target, sold 814,000 copies in the first weekend of its release — nearly as many as Barack Obama’s 2020 memoir.
Swift, whose music is distributed by Universal Music, has during the span of the Eras tour achieved a level of cultural and musical domination akin to the craze surrounding The Beatles a half century ago.
When tickets first went on sale in November 2022, overwhelming demand crashed TicketMaster’s site, triggering a public outcry that has resulted in a US Department of Justice lawsuit against the ticketing giant. The tour boosted local economies as it travelled first across the US and then the rest of the world.
Swift last year made up 1.8 per cent of all US recorded music sales, accounting for one in every 78 US audio streams, according to data group Luminate.
The singer, who got her start writing songs after school as a teenager in Nashville, broke into tears during a recent show in Toronto as she reflected on the tour’s imminent end after 18 months.
“My band, my crew, all my fellow performers, we have put so much of our lives into this,” she said.
+ There are no comments
Add yours