Officially closed in Vancouver on Sunday December 8, Taylor Swift’s 149-date world tour, The Eras Tour, has set a new record with over $2 billion in takings, according to the New York Times! This kaleidoscopic journey through the singer-songwriter’s 18-year career has become the most lucrative in music history, surpassing even Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres World Tour.
“We’re about to embark on one last great adventure together”.
This is how pop megastar, seasoned businesswoman and billionaire since the end of July 2023, Taylor Swift opened the final concert of her The Eras Tour on the evening of December 8.
Launched on March 17, 2023 in Glendale, Arizona (USA), this world tour has taken the beauty on the road and in the air for two years, covering 149 dates in 21 countries.
Each time, a gigantic 3-hour, 20-minute show played to full houses, involving no less than a dozen costume changes and brimming with little attentions, hidden tracks and surprises for her beloved fans, the swifties. Just take a look at her clip “I can do it with a broken heart” or read our latest LUXUS MAGAZINE in print format (Autumn-Winter 2024-25, N°9) to get an idea of thephysical and mental training required for this high-flying show.
Far from being twilight, her final show, at once grandiose and intimate, continued right up to the last moment to bring happiness and magic to the eyes of the 54,000 fans at Vancouvers’ BC Place Stadium, some of whom had already attended other dates with the singer. A young audience, mostly female but not exclusively, dressed for the occasion in Americana style, blending cowboy influences and glitter, and singing along to her greatest hits, the legacy of an 18-year career marked by successes, difficulties asserting herself and heartbreak.
“Long Live” Vancouver
For The Eras Tour, Taylor Swift transformed her song“Long Live”, taken from her third studio album Speak Now (2010), into an anthem for the occasion, replacing the lyrics “end of a decade” with “end of an era”.
As she has done every evening for the past two years, Taylor Swift warmly thanked her fans and crew from the stage under a shower of confetti, then ended with a series of hugs – all American that she is – to her dancers and musicians.
However, the evening of December 8 has a different flavour, like a gentle melancholy.
When she embarked on this gigantic tour, the singer affectionately nicknamed Taytay by her devoted fans already knew that the show’s theme would be nostalgia for the present.
Deprived of concerts due to confinement, the prolific artist had nevertheless released two studio albums – Folklore and Evermore – which, unlike her previous opuses, had not been able to benefit from touring. This was without counting “Midnights”, released in October 2022 at a time when the artist wanted more than ever to commune with his public once again. Initially, “The Eras Tour” was to have included her three albums alone.
In the end, the singer chose to include her other 7 first albums, each representing a different part of her life (musical influences, loves, clothing and hair styles, personal reflections), in short, her Eras (literally eras).
Finally, his latest and eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, released in April 2024, naturally found its place, making up the 11 Eras of the tour.
“I’d like to thank you all for taking part in the most exciting chapter of my life to date – my Eras Tour”, declared the superstar, before blasting ‘Karma’, a track taken from Midnights, into a packed stadium.
True to her habit of personalizing every fan experience in her own way, Taylor Swift took the opportunity to change the song’s lyrics to bring it into line with her current love life, speaking instead of “the guy from the Chiefs”. A cryptic message of which she has the secret and which refers to the famous quarterback, Travis Kelcey.
As the show drew to a close, the young woman declared “I was just thinking”, “because we’ve had so much time to prepare for the end of this tour that I was trying to think of songs that really sum up how I feel, so I decided to go back to the beginning”.
Her farewell song, first strummed on guitar, was in fact a medley of songs from her debut, including “Just a Girl”, “A Place in This World” and “New Romantics”. She then turned to her piano to play a few notes from her anthems “Long Live” and “New Year’s Day”.
She then closed the tour with “The Manuscript” from her latest album, turning her back on the ritualized finale to her penultimate, catchy album Midnights.
The piano composition ends with these lines: “The only thing that remains is the manuscript, a final reminder of my journey by your side, from time to time I reread the manuscript, but the story is no longer mine. Bryan West for USA Today noted the poetic dimension of the lineup for this final date : the tour closed with a piano performance of the final track from his latest album. Where the keyboard had been used to interpret Tim McGraw, his first track from his first opus, to open the festivities two years earlier.
The most lucrative tour in history
In December 2023, The Eras Tour was the first to gross a billion dollars. Total ticket sales after the three dates at Vancouver’s B.C. Place Stadium ended up at over two billion dollars!
A figure confirmed by his production company and reported by the New York Times, “twice as much as any other tour ever done”, according to Forbes magazine.
Until now, the figures reported in the press were essentially forecasts drawn up by the trade publication Pollstar. Last November, the latter estimated that the tour’s revenues would exceed one billion dollars, based on ticketing reports, venue capacities and other measurable criteria.
Taylor Swift’s team told the New York Times that 10,168,008 spectators attended the 149 concerts on six continents, with an average ticket price of $204. And this, despite soaring ticket resale prices.
The two-billion-dollar tour enabled the pop megastar to dethrone the titleholder of the record for most tour dates. This was previously held by Coldplay’s 156-date Music of the Spheres World Tour, which ended last August. In financial terms, The Eras Tour even surpasses the $930 million of Elton John’s farewell tour.
The $2 billion revenue figure does not include sales of merchandising, tickets for the film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, the Eras Tour Book or any other source of income.
During the tour, Taylor Swift also released Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, a film-concert shown in some 8500 cinemas worldwide which, with $267 million (for a production cost of $15 million), became the most successful film-concert in history. In the first two weeks alone, it earned $35 million.
Other records include the highest attendance ever at iconic venues such as Wembley Stadium in England. In the same legendary stadium that has seen the likes of Queen, Live Aid and Adele, she even broke the record for the highest use of mobile data during a concert.
Fans used 5.57 TB of data, equivalent to listening to Taylor Swift’s entire catalog for ten years.
Traffic on mobile networks during the Eras tour also exceeded that of major sporting events, including the recent UEFA Champions League and FA Cup finals. It’s worth noting that 12% of the 90,000 spectators at Wembley stadium were international visitors, mostly Americans and Canadians. The latter had also flocked to France, attracted by far more attractive ticket prices than those on American soil.
Finally, last October, seven months after the start of her tour, Forbes magazine announced that Taylor Swift had become a billionaire, with an estimated fortune of $1.6 billion. Never before had an artist become a billionaire through music revenues alone, not even Madonna, or Beyoncé.
Can a concert itself generate nostalgia? Taylor Swift seems to be proving it. In any case, The Eras Tour will be remembered for its pyrotechnic gigantism, its fan service experience, its attendance and its meticulously coherent storytelling. In the meantime, the woman who was voted Time Magazine’s Personality of the Year in 2023, crowned the most streamed artist of the year in 2024, who shook up the global economy and even gave birth to the neologism “swiftonomics”, is already preparing her return to the front of the stage, or rather behind the camera. The artist is said to be in pre-production on her first feature film as writer and director. Although nothing has been leaked so far, one thing is certain: Taylor Swift has been waiting for her tour to come to an end before fully devoting herself to it.
Read also > Barely released, Taylor Swift’s new album is already a box-office hit
Featured Photo: © Disney+
