As Taylor Swift rolls into Los Angeles this week, the frenzy surrounding her record-breaking Eras Tour is in high gear.
The headlines he gave flowed $100,000 bonuses to his staff. Politicians asked him to postpone his concerts in solidarity with the striking hotel workers. Scalped tickets cost $3,000 and up. And there are way, way too many friendship bracelets to count.
These days, Taylor Swift is just the center of a fragmented music world.
The pop superstar’s tour, now wrapping up its first North American leg with six nights at SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles, is both a business and a cultural juggernaut. Swift’s catalog of generation-defining hits and canny marketing sense have helped her achieve a level of white-hot demand and media saturation not seen since the 1980s heyday of Michael Jackson and Madonna — a dominance largely embraced by entertainment business as impossible to imitate. in the 21st century fragment.
“The only thing I can compare it to is the phenomenon of Beatlemania,” said Billy Joel, who attended Swift’s show in Tampa, Fla., with his wife and daughters.
In a summer of tours by stars like Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Morgan Wallen and Drake, Swift’s stands apart, in numbers and in the media noise. Although Swift, 33, and her promoters do not publicly report box-office numbers, trade publication Pollstar estimated that she sells about $14 million in tickets each night. By the end of the entire world tour, booked with 146 stadium dates through 2024, Swift’s sales could reach $1.4 billion or more — more than Elton John’s $939 million for his multiyear farewell tour, the current record-holder.
Swift now has more No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 throughout her career than any other woman, surpassing Barbra Streisand. In a tour that tops Swift’s entire career, she has placed 10 albums on that chart this year and is the first living artist since trumpeter and bandleader Herb Alpert in 1966 to have four Top 10 titles in the same time.
“It’s an amazing feat,” Alpert, 88, said in a phone interview. “With the way radio is now, and the way music is distributed, with streaming, I don’t think anyone can do it in this day and age.”
But how did a concert tour become more than: fodder for gossip columns, the subject of weather forecasta grace for friendship-bracelet necklace — the unofficial currency of Swiftie fandom — and the reason why no one gets it a hotel room in Cincinnati at the end of June?
“He’s the best CEO, and best chief marketing officer, in the history of music,” said Nathan Hubbard, a longtime music and ticketing executive who hosts a Quick podcast. “She follows people like Bono, Jay-Z and Madonna, who know their brands very well. But of all of them, Taylor was the first to be natively online.”
Swifties recount the stream of celebrity fans who arrive each night: Julia Roberts, new New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, even Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav. But Swift also made each show a news event by adding two “surprise songs,” often with headline-grabbing guests. On the July day she released a music video featuring Taylor Lautner, an ex-boyfriend, the actor crossed the stage in Kansas City, Mo., and gave Swift an effusive tribute — “not just for the singer you,” Lautner said, “but for the people you are.” The crowd registered its approval with an audible roar.
Taylorpalooza reaches every level of the news media, which began the cycle of coverage by reporting on Swift’s ticketing fiasco in November, when fans — and scalper bots — crushed Ticketmaster’s systems. , which led to a heated hearing in the Senate Judiciary. Since then, no nugget of Swift news seems to have escaped the coverage, from stars in the stands to oddities like a concert in Seattle that, according to one researcher, shook the ground with an intensity equal to 2.3- magnitude earthquake.
Music critics have described the Eras Tour as showcasing Swift at the top of her game as a media-savvy, big-tent talent, a pop star with a knack for grand spectacle as well as the polished artistry of a classic songwriter. .
Shania Twain, the country-pop star whose career in some ways prefigured Swift’s, caught up on the Las Vegas stop of the Eras Tour, a 44-plus song production lasting up to three and a half hours. He praised Swift’s “nice balance” of high-tech stagecraft and intimate performance segments. “I have to applaud him,” Twain said in a phone interview. “As a performer, I know that work.”
The power of Swift’s army of fans — and fear of star crossing, or even appearing on — kept most of the press about the tour sunny. While some fans (and parents) balked at ticket prices and challenges securing seats, most of the frustration was directed directly at Ticketmaster, not Swift. After weeks of headlines romantically linking Swift to a frontman some fans considered To make matters worse, reports circulated on celebrity pages that they had split. (Swift representatives declined to comment for this article.)
For fans, the shows are a pilgrimage, and a rediscovery of the joys of mass gatherings. Flights are packed with Swifties, and travelers swap stories and compare outfits — drawn from looks associated with Swift “eras” — in stadium corridors and parking lots. In Kansas City, comedian Nikki Glaser attended her eighth show, an undertaking she estimated cost her $25,000.
“This year I decided not to freeze my eggs,” Glaser said. “I’m going to put that money on the thing I love most in the world, which is Taylor Swift.”
Before Eras, Swift hadn’t toured since 2018. And her catalog grew by seven No. 1 album since then, fueled in part by three re-recorded “Taylor’s Versions” of her early LPs — a project Swift’s fans have hailed as a crusade to regain control of her music, though it’s also this act of revenge came after the sale of Swift’s former record label, a move that, she said, “took my life’s work out of me.”
“Folklore” and “Evermore” broadened his taste for fantastical indie-folk and brought new collaborators into the fold: Aaron Dessner from the band National and Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, rock-world figures who helped -attract new audiences.
This year’s other major tour that enticed fans to book transcontinental flights, and show costume and rapture, is also a woman: Beyoncé, 41, whose Renaissance tour is a fantasia of disco and retrofuturism. Like Swift, she’s also a trailblazing artist-entrepreneur, maintaining tight control over her career and fostering a rich connection with fans online. Along with Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” a critique of patriarchy told in hot pink, they are symbols of powerful women who dominate pop culture discourse.
But musically, at least, the scale and success of Swift’s tour is unmatched. Later this month, after completing 53 shows in the United States, he will begin an international itinerary of at least 78 more before returning to North America next fall. Beyoncé’s entire tour has 56 dates; Springsteen’s, 90. (Harry Styles recently wrapped a 173-date tour of arenas and stadiums, grossing about $590 million.)
Outside Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, fans posed for selfies and shared their ticketing ordeals. Esmeralda Tinoco and Sami Cytron, 24-year-old former sorority sisters, said they paid $645 for two seats. In an instant, Karlee Patrick and Emily DeGruson, both 18 and dressed as a pair of angel/devil costumes after a line in Swift’s “Cruel Summer,” sit “Taylorgating” on the edge of the parking lot; they said they paid $100 for parking but couldn’t afford tickets.
When Swift’s opening acts finished, the crowd poured in. Glaser, the comedian, later said that of the eight shows he went to, his favorites were the ones he brought his mom to — and converted him to Swiftie fandom.
“Everybody loves him,” Glaser said his mother told him after a show in Texas. “Now I understand.”
