No. 4 – Taylor Swift

– Taylor Swift

No. 4
Taylor Swift 
Decade Gross: $899,627,048

Tours:  Speak Now World Tour (2011-12) Red Tour (2013-14); 1989 Tour (2015) Taylor Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour (2018).

The Team:  Touring – The Messina Group, Louis Messina; Management: 13 Management

Taylor Swift started the 20-teens as a country princess but ended the decade as a pop queen; a touring juggernaut who will likely cross the $1 billion mark in ticket sales since 2010 soon after her upcoming “Lover Fest” dates launch in July.

Swift made the leap from playing arenas to stadiums, though she’d cut her teeth in them opening for George Strait in 2007. “Our tour started in January,” recalls TMG’s Louis Messina, who has booked tours for Swift since she was 17. 

“George plays in the round. She walks up there, back then she used a head mic, and walks up the middle aisle and starts singing. Here’s this little 17-year-old girl singing about high school boyfriends, and being in love, getting her heart broken. And by the third song, she had that audience in the palm of her hand.”

Swift still does. Her subject matter has grown up and she is clearly master of her own universe now, selling out stadium tours and coming full circle in her mentor Strait’s footsteps. On her 2018 “Reputation” stadium tour, she sold out two shows Oct. 5-6 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas – where Strait famously broke attendance records in his “The Cowboy Rides Away” tour finale in 2014.