Planet Earth (Taylor’s Version): Taylor Swift Dominates It All

2024 Top 10 Worldwide Tours
No. 1 Taylor Swift
Gross: $1,043,421,552
Average Ticket Price: $200.27
Average Tickets Sold Per Show: 65,126
Total Tickets: 5,210,054
Average Gross: $13,042,769

The earth-shattering, culturally unifying spectacle known as Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” came to an end Dec. 8 at Vancouver, British Columbia’s B.C. Place stadium. It was the 149th performance of a tour that spanned 51 cities, 19 countries and five continents.

Its sheer breadth and length — it ran nearly 21 months after its March 2023 start in Glendale, Arizona — would be reason enough for it to enter the annals of all-time cultural undertakings.

Then there’s the box-office returns, which were both expected and gobsmacking. 

Pollstar estimated the tour’s gross at $2.2 billion on 10.055 million tickets. The per-show average of 67,487 broke the 13-year-old record set by U2 on the in-the-round “360 Tour.” Those estimates are based on extensive research including ticket price in each market, venue capacities, premium seating and comparable tour data.

Although, in fairness to our crack research team, there is no comparable tour. Not really.

“Eras” was, by some margin, the highest grossing tour of all time. 

And consider this: In 2022, Pollstar ranked the top touring artists of the then-40-year “Pollstar Era.” Only two artists — The Rolling Stones and U2 — had topped $2 billion. In a 40 year period. And for what it’s worth, “Eras” beat those two iconic rock bands’ four-decade gross (if only just barely).

Now of course, inflation — in the economy in general and in ticket prices specifically — played some role in Miss Americana’s surge to the top of the rankings, but dismissing this achievement as a function of market forces and monetary policy would be an Olympian effort at missing-the-point.

Swift is  arguably the world’s most famous person, with now 11 albums under her belt, starting with her sweet, eponymous country debut (which, full disclosure, includes songs written during an algebra class taught by my mom) and continuing with hit-laden disc after hit-laden disc through her latest, The Tortured Poets Department, which she released while on the biggest tour in the history of music.

There are, of course, also the “Taylor’s Version” re-releases, Swift’s clever (and lucrative) nose-thumbing at the dispute over masters of her early albums, which were acquired by Scooter Braun, launching a years-long controversy. For what it’s worth, the last “Eras” show came 1,989 days after Braun acquired the masters. 

Yes, we checked. 

No, we don’t think it’s a coincidence.

Because nothing is a happy accident with Taylor Swift. 

And that’s why she’s more than merely the world’s biggest pop star. She is more like an actual star with a gravitational pull so immense nearly everything in culture and society and politics is whipped into her orbit.

To wit: pro football couldn’t get more popular, could it? The Kansas City Chiefs future Hall of Fame tight end couldn’t somehow get more recognition, could he? Track Chiefs TV ratings and Travis Kelce’s jersey sales after his relationship with Swift went public and get back to me.

The latest push for ticketing reform sprung from the less-than-ideal onsale for “Eras,” which prompted a Senate interrogation of Live Nation President and CFO Joe Berchtold in a made-for-campaign-season televised committee hearing. 

And Attorney General Merrick Garland can insist that the Department of Justice’s effort to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster via an antitrust action is “not because Ticketmaster’s conduct is inconvenient or frustrating,” but … well, we know how the pressure for the feds to act started. Look what you made them do, indeed.

Taylor Swift does the impossible: she makes $2 billion on tour and she galvanizes unity in a politically disparate America. At least she did until she endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris after the Sept. 10 presidential debate with Democrats gleeful that her imprimatur would drive the endless supply of voting-age Swifties to the polls to tip the election.

Maybe she can’t do everything.

Though on “Eras,” she certainly tried. 

The performances were, to put it mildly, expansive. Featuring state-of-the-art production, captivating choreography and staging replete with the Easter eggs Swifies are so famous for sussing, the show ran some three and a half hours featuring upwards of 40 songs. 

It covered every, well, era of her career in an unrelenting overview of an artist’s evolution and her elevation to a cultural behemoth whose concerts are seen as economic drivers so valuable that, at times, the routing of the tour caused diplomatic rows, particularly in Asia, where Singapore’s incentives to bring Swift to the city-state — and nowhere else in Southeast Asia — caused an uproar among its neighbors, with a Thai politician demanding explanations from the Singaporean ambassador and Indonesian lawmakers lamenting the lost economic impact.

In Taiwan, Swift’s bypassing of the island was a much-debated issue in the presidential election. Across the strait in China, a government official tasked with bringing more high-profile concerts to the People’s Republic referred to Swift as “walking GDP.”

And he’s not exaggerating. Eventually fully peer-reviewed economic studies will give a firm answer on the impact of what the Wall Street Journal dubbed “Swiftonomics,” a phenomenon that many local and national officials said helped goose the economy during the post-Covid recovery. Hospitality industry trade groups said the tour increased hotel spending in the U.S. by more than $1 billion. Federal Reserve officials said the first American leg of the tour contributed $4.3 billion to the U.S.’s GDP — that’s roughly the gross domestic product of Suriname — and British officials said her stops in the U.K., including a record-setting eight at Wembley Stadium, pumped £1 billion ($1.27 billion) into the economy there.

And that was repeated everywhere she went, which explains the consternation of bypassed locales. 

It would be simple to cast “Eras” as the crowning achievement of Swift’s already much-ballyhooed career, but bear in mind: she’s only 35 (newly so, having a birthday Dec. 13). Yes, “Eras” was a career-spanning retrospective but given her prolific output, she’s got plenty more career to give.

When whatever’s coming next comes around, Swift will be facing her toughest competition ever: herself. And there’s little doubt she’ll win again.