Taylor Swift’s Record-Setting Opener Leads What Promoter Says Is Already Her Biggest Selling Tour

Kimberly Carrillo – Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift performs at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., May 8, 2018.

Taylor Swift’s massive “Reputation” tour has launched and to the surprise of no one her first show was received by a massive and enthusiastic crowd that set an attendance record at Univ. of Phoenix Stadium.

The night before the show, Pollstar counted 853 tickets left on Ticketmaster for the May 8 show at

When Team Taylor made the decision about a week before the opener to remove resale tickets from Ticketmaster, sources told Pollstar it signaled she was trying to get people to buy up the remaining unsold seats through the primary market.

Pollstar reached out to Swift’s longtime promoter, Louis Messina of Messina Touring Group, who immediately shrugged off questions about rumored slow ticket sales with the response: “No story here, [this is] her biggest selling and grossing tour.”

There is plenty of reason to believe Messina. Any excess inventory likely did not bother Swift, as her team made the call to add second and even third nights of stadium plays in multiple markets.

Team Swift may be pursuing a strategy to ensure every fan has access to a seat through the primary market, meaning they’re pricing tickets closer to market value and leaving scalpers to unload their tickets at heavily discounted prices. A similar situation played out with Jay-Z’s last tour where he ended up with his largest-grossing tour ever – logging at least $1 million for most nights of his “4:44” run – despite not always selling every ticket.

Garth Brooks’ latest tour, where he would hold arenas for lengthy periods and continue adding shows as the previously announced ones sold out, was one notable example of the “selling into demand” strategy that Swift and Jay-Z seem to be taking a page from.

For the first onsale fans had to register with Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan service last year, and some complained that prices had dropped since the initial onsale.

A source with lots of experience in secondary ticketing told Pollstar that Swift and her people likely did overprice some of the tickets initially sold through Verified Fan, but with services like VF still being so new, it was difficult to understand the effects of initial pricing.

What seems to have been learned, the source said, is that if fans are required to register early and buy merch to get to the front of a digital line for tickets, it needs to be ensured that those fans get the best possible price, the lowest organizers will be willing to let prices drop. With all of that in mind though, the source said VF does a lot of very good things, and this is a natural part of integrating new tech into the industry.

Brett Goldberg of TickPick told Pollstar that the situation with Taylor Swift showed why there has always been a secondary market, because, put simply, “Pricing is difficult.”

“I would have guessed that this would be a [months-ahead sellout,]” Goldberg said, adding that one difficult thing about pricing is that the value of a product can change, and that perhaps in early meetings the prices were set at market value, but many factors can cause market value to shift.

One key factor about this tour that can get overlooked is that it is a stadium tour, meaning the venues are huge and a perceived availability of tickets might be deceptive.

Looking at some of the first shows of the tour, at press time there were still plenty of sections with tickets available, but most stadiums already appeared to have the vast majority of inventory already moved (Some venues like the 90,000-capacity Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., have such large upper sections that it was more difficult to estimate remaining inventory.)

For the next show of the tour, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., Pollstar counted approximately 1,807 tickets available through Ticketmaster at press time, estimating 100 tickets for the seven sections that had 100+ remaining seats. While that seems like a lot, consider that Levi’s Stadium has a maximum capacity of 68,500.

Obviously each market is different, and as the tour rolls along we will see how initial reports of strong sales pan out.

Now that Swift has begun her tour in earnest, it seems inevitable that she will have a well-attended, well-received show in most markets, and that it will be a huge financial success.

While not every stadium may be 100 percent sold out, with pricing closer to market value, greater capacity than arenas and multiple-night stands, (sometimes in neighboring markets like East Rutherford, N.J., and Foxboro, Mass.) Swift is poised to have a record-setting run.