Taylor Swift performing at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey in May. Her Eras Tour has expanded to include 146 stadium dates. Photo / Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet, The New York Times
The pop star’s record-breaking, career-spanning show has dominated the Northern Hemisphere summer, commanding attention and whipping up demand at a level thought unachievable in a fragmented age.
As Taylor Swift rolled into Los Angeles this month, the frenzy surrounding her record-breaking Eras Tour was already in high gear.
Headlines gushed that she had given US$100,000 ($165,000) bonuses to her crew. Politicians asked her to postpone her concerts in solidarity with striking hotel workers. Scalped tickets were going for US$3000 ($4950) and up. And there were way, way too many friendship bracelets to count.
These days, the centre of an otherwise splintered music world can only be Taylor Swift.
The pop superstar’s tour, which finished its initial North American leg this week with six nights at SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles, has been a both a business and a cultural juggernaut. Swift’s catalogue of generation-defining hits and canny marketing sense has 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 that the entertainment business had largely accepted as impossible to replicate in the fragmented 21st century.
“The only thing I can compare it to is the phenomenon of Beatlemania,” said Billy Joel, who attended Swift’s show in Tampa, Florida, with his wife and young daughters.
In a summer of tours by stars like Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, Morgan Wallen and Drake, Swift’s stands apart, in numbers and in media noise. Although Swift, 33, and her promoters do not publicly report box-office figures, trade publication Pollstar estimated that she has been selling about US$14 million ($23 million) in tickets each night. By the end of the full world tour, which is booked with 146 stadium dates well into 2024, Swift’s sales could reach US$1.4 billion ($2.3 billion) or more — exceeding Elton John’s US$939 million ($1.5 billion) for his multi-year farewell tour, the current record-holder.
Swift has now had more No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 over the course of her career than any other woman, surpassing Barbra Streisand. With the tour lifting Swift’s entire body of work, 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 titles in the Top 10 at the same time.
“It’s a pretty amazing feat,” Alpert, 88, said in a phone interview. “With the way radio is these days, and the way music is distributed, with streaming, I didn’t think anyone in this era could do it.”
But how did a concert tour become so much more: fodder for gossip columns, the subject of weather reports, a boon for friendship-bracelet beads — the unofficial currency of Swiftie fandom — and the reason nobody could get a hotel room in Cincinnati at the end of June?
“She is the best CEO, and best chief marketing officer, in the history of music,” said Nathan Hubbard, a longtime music and ticketing executive who co-hosts a Swift podcast. “She is following people like Bono, Jay-Z and Madonna, who were acutely aware of their brands. But of all of them, Taylor is the first one to be actively online.”
Swifties have chronicled the stream of celebrity fans who have turned up each night: Julia Roberts, New York Jets new quarterback Aaron Rodgers, and even Flavor Flav of Public Enemy. But Swift has also made each show a news event by adding two “surprise songs,” often with headline-grabbing guests. On the July day that she put out a music video featuring Taylor Lautner, an ex-boyfriend, the actor backflipped across the stage in Kansas City, Missouri, and paid Swift effusive tribute — “not just for the singer you are,” Lautner said, “but for the human you are.” The crowd registered its approval with an earsplitting roar.
The Taylorpalooza extends to every level of the news media, which began the coverage cycle by chronicling Swift’s ticketing fiasco in November, when fans — and scalpers’ bots — crushed Ticketmaster’s systems, leading to a heated Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Since then, seemingly no nugget of Swift news has escaped coverage, from the stars in the stands to oddities like a Seattle concert that, according to one researcher, shook the ground with an intensity equivalent to a 2.3 magnitude earthquake.
Music critics have portrayed the Eras Tour as showing 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 the Las Vegas stop of the Eras Tour, a 44-plus song production that goes as long as 3 1/2 hours. She praised Swift’s “beautiful balance” of high-tech stagecraft and intimate performance segments. “I have to applaud her,” Twain said in a telephone interview. “As a performer, I know that work that goes into it.”
The power of Swift’s fan army — and fear of crossing the star, or even appearing to — has kept nearly all of the press about the tour sunny. Although some fans (and parents) baulked at the ticket prices and challenges of securing seats, most frustration was directed squarely at Ticketmaster, not Swift. After a few weeks of headlines romantically linking Swift with a frontman some fans considered to be problematic, reports spread in the celebrity pages that they had split. (Swift’s 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 travellers trade stories and compare outfits — drawn from looks associated with Swift “eras” — in stadium corridors and parking lots. In Kansas City, comedian Nikki Glaser was attending her eighth show, a commitment that she estimated has cost her US$25,000 ($41,000).
“This year I decided not to freeze my eggs,” Glaser said. “I’m going to put that money toward the thing I love most in the world, which is Taylor Swift.”
Before Eras, Swift hadn’t been on tour since 2018. And her catalogue has grown by seven No. 1 albums since then, fuelled in part by three rerecorded “Taylor’s Versions” of her first LPs — a project hailed by Swift’s fans as a crusade to regain control of her music, though it is also an act of revenge after the sale of Swift’s former record label, a move that, she said, “stripped me of my life’s work”.
Folklore and Evermore expanded her palate into fantastical indie-folk and brought new collaborators into the fold: Aaron Dessner from the band the National and Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, rock-world figures who helped attract new listeners.
The other major tour this year that is enticing fans to book transcontinental flights and to show up costumed and in rapture, is also by a woman: Beyonce, 41, whose Renaissance tour is a fantasia of disco and retrofuturism. Like Swift, she is also a trailblazing artist-entrepreneur, maintaining tight control over her career and fostering a rich connection with fans online. Together with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a critique of the patriarchy told in hot pink, they are signs of powerful women ruling the discourse of pop culture.
But in music, at least, the scale and success of Swift’s tour is without equal. Later this month, after completing 53 shows in the United States, she will kick off an international itinerary of at least 78 more before returning to North America next fall. Beyoncé's full tour has 56 dates; Springsteen’s, 90. (Recently, Harry Styles wrapped a 173-date tour in arenas and stadiums, grossing about US$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 had paid US$645 ($1065) for two seats. A stone’s throw away, Karlee Patrick and Emily DeGruson, both 18 and dressed as a pair in angel/devil costumes after a line in Swift’s Cruel Summer, sat “Taylorgating” at the edge of the parking lot; they said they had paid US$100 ($165) for parking but couldn’t afford tickets.
As Swift’s opening acts finished, the crowd rushed in. Glaser, the comedian, later said that of the eight shows she had been to, her favourites were the ones where she had brought her mother — and converted her to Swiftie fandom.
“Everyone is in love with her,” Glaser said her mom told her after one show in Texas. “Now I get it.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Ben Sisario
Photographs by: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet and Cassidy Araiza
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
The megastar doubled down on her country aesthetic.