It’s a tour of superlatives. This weekend (July 7th/8th) Taylor Swift is playing at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City. A stop on her “Eras” world tour, which has been running since March 17, 2023, which will first take her through the USA, then to South America and Asia/Pacific and in the coming year also to Europe.
Their German gigs will take place in July 2024 in Gelsenkirchen, quasi “Auf Schalke”, as well as in Hamburg and Munich.
Live business at dizzying heights.
As the US trade journal “Pollstar” reports in an unusually flowery overview analysis, the first 22 Swift dates with more than 1.1 million tickets sold in the USA will generate sales of over 300 million dollars. According to Pollstar, these initial totals are considered estimates, as full accounts will not be available until mid-August after Swift’s quadruple show at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Southern California.
After a breather we head over to Mexico.
At the end of the tour, which in 2024 on the second evening of the concert in London’s Wembley Stadium will be accompanied by a party that is sure to be lavish, the live entertainment experts expect that the total sales of the “astounding, unbelievable, unimaginable sum of 1, $4 billion” is approaching. These estimates are considered “fairly conservative”.
Swift will then have played 102 concerts. The musician has described the tour, which is considered a mega catch-up tour after the pandemic years, as a “journey through all musical eras of my career”. A Swiftian dance of songs, with a focus on the 2022 album “Midnights”.
As with Beyonce’s most recent European tour with exclusive luxury tickets – which is said to have had an effect on the inflation rate in Sweden, for example – some superstars are breaking all previous dimensions of classical concert operations.
“Pollstar” speaks of various signs that Taylor Swift is currently boosting the US economy as a whole, i.e. beyond the sold-out football and baseball stadiums with merch and ice-cold beer in plastic cups.
According to an analysis by online research group QuestionPro, the US portion of the tour is expected to have a $5 billion economic impact. According to the researchers, that is a lot more than the gross domestic product that is achieved in around 50 smaller countries.
Even on a smaller scale, there are remarkable numbers: The metropolis of Chicago achieved almost 97 percent hotel occupancy during three guest performances by Swift at “Soldier Field”. Las Vegas saw the highest post-pandemic tourism spending. “Swift is a stronger revenue driver than gambling, buffets and cheap liquor,” says the survey.
It also takes a look at the mechanics of the live industry, where tour timing is a cardinal issue: global artists and agents want to make sure they avoid similarly prominent acts that are around at the same time promote the same venues.
Swift’s timing in the US would therefore also be close to perfect in macroeconomic terms. So their tour would have “launched” in the US at a time when there was a pent-up demand for major concerts and a still “working consumer class”. Ergo: If Taylor had waited a little longer, this perfect storm might have dissipated: Or the fear of a recession would have led to a tighter grip on music lovers’ wallets…