Taylor Swift’s “Eras” becomes the most successful concert of all time

Taylor Swift’s “Eras” becomes the most successful concert of all time

Unlock Editor’s Digest for free

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour grossed $2.1 billion, making it the highest-grossing concert in history and capping two years of the pop star’s financial and cultural dominance.

The figure includes 10 million tickets sold for 149 shows, a person familiar with the matter said. Swift ended the tour with a final performance Sunday night in Vancouver, Canada.

The total of $2.1 billion is double that of any other concert tour in history. It surpassed Elton John’s five-year farewell tour, which grossed $939 million from more than 300 shows, and Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres, which sold more than $1 billion from about 170 dates.

The huge sales figures do not take into account the earnings of resellers on the secondary market, where the seats fetched thousands of dollars above their face value, or the earnings from merchandise sold at the concerts.

Swift recently released a book of photographs from the Eras tour that quickly overshadowed most major releases from professional publishers. The companion book to Eras, available only through retailer Target, sold 814,000 copies in the first weekend of its release – nearly as many as Barack Obama’s 2020 memoir.

Swift, whose music is distributed by Universal Music, has achieved a level of cultural and musical dominance over the course of the Eras tour that resembles the hype surrounding The Beatles half a century ago.

When the tickets first went on sale in November 2022, overwhelming demand crashed TicketMaster’s website and sparked a public outcry that led to a lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice against the ticket giant. The tour boosted the local economy as it traveled first across the United States and then the rest of the world.

Swift accounted for 1.8 percent of all recorded music sales in the U.S. last year, accounting for one in 78 U.S. audio streams, according to data group Luminate.

The singer, who began writing songs after school as a teenager in Nashville, broke down in tears during a recent performance in Toronto as she reflected on the impending end of the tour after 18 months.

“My band, my crew, all of my fellow musicians, we put so much of our lives into this,” she said.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *