If you’re a Swiftie, then you probably know how hard it is to get tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. With ticket prices reaching up to $1,000, it seems nearly impossible for the average person to attend the show.
But Swifties, the name given to Taylor fans, are not average people. True die-hard Swifties are often willing to spend their entire emergency fund to buy one of these coveted tickets.
For non-Swifties, here are the facts. On Nov. 1, 2022, Taylor Swift officially announced the Eras Tour after teasing her fans during a tour for Midnights (her tenth studio album). Swift said that the Eras Tour would kick off on March 18, 2023. That day, fans scrambled to get tickets. Swift proceeded to add 17 more dates to the U.S. leg of the tour, making the Eras her biggest tour yet.
It is expected that 2.4 million people will attend the Eras Tour. But the ticket-buying process was a real debacle, with multiple complications as people clicked on the popular ticket buying app TicketMaster, something which really hurt TicketMaster’s reputation.
As the tour has gotten underway, local economies have noticed some unexpected changes due to the tour. If you live in one of the 20 locales Swift has performed in the last few months, your city has probably seen a spike in revenue from the millions of fans who traveled from near and far. In fact, the impact of the Eras Tour on local economies is reflected in the numbers. According to Time Magazine, the tour has resulted in a gross of $2.2 billion in North American ticket sales alone, while millions of tour songs have been streamed, reaching a nearly 80% spike in those listening to Swift’s music catalog in the weeks after the tour’s start.
Billboard estimates that the Eras Tour will likely surpass the $1 billion mark next March, while Swift is touring internationally. If this holds true, she will achieve the milestone of having the biggest tour in music history, surpassing Elton John’s farewell tour, which wrapped up earlier this summer and holds the current record of $939 million. The Eras Tour will continue for another seven months before concluding in November of 2024 in Toronto (although some have spread rumors that Swift may be secretly planning on releasing more dates).
The Eras Tour is predicted to generate close to $5 billion in consumer spending in the United States alone. “If Taylor Swift were an economy, she’d be bigger than 50 countries,” said Dan Fleetwood, President of QuestionPro Research and Insights, in a story for GlobalNewsWire.
In an average concert, $100 spent on live performances generates an estimated $300 in ancillary local spending on things like hotels, food and transportation. But for the Eras Tour, Swifties are taking this to the next level, dropping an estimated $1,300-$1,500 on things like outfits and costumes, merchandise, and dining and travel, boosting local economies by hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single weekend.
So next time you read in the news that the U.S. economy is failing, it’s not for lack of trying on the part of Taylor Swift, whose impact on the world seems to be showing no sign of slowing down.
