Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour grand total: A record $2 billion
For the past 21 months, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has been the biggest thing in music.
Now we know exactly how big.
Through its 149th and final show, which took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Sunday, Swift’s tour sold a total of $2,077,618,725 in tickets. That’s 2 billion and change — double the gross ticket sales of any other concert tour in history and an extraordinary new benchmark for a white-hot international concert business.
Those figures were confirmed to The New York Times for the first time by Taylor Swift Touring, the singer’s production company. While the financial details of the Eras Tour have been a subject of constant industry speculation since tickets were first offered more than two years ago, Swift has never authorized disclosure of the tour’s numbers until now.
The official results are not far from the estimates that trade journalists and industry analysts have been crunching for months. But they solidify the enormous scale of Swift’s accomplishment. Just a few months ago, Billboard magazine reported that Coldplay had set an industry record with $1 billion in ticket sales for its 156-date Music of the Spheres World Tour — a figure that is just half of Swift’s total for a similar stretch of shows in stadiums and arenas.
Every date on the Eras Tour was sold out, and spare tickets were scalped at eye-popping prices — or traded within the protective Swiftie fan community, often at face value.
According to Swift’s touring company, a total of 10,168,008 people attended the concerts, which means that, on average, each seat went for about $204. That is well above the industry average of $131 for the top 100 tours around the world in 2023, according to Pollstar, a trade publication.
The biggest single night’s attendance was in Melbourne, Australia, on Feb. 16, 2024, with 96,006. And Swift’s eight nights at Wembley Stadium in London, which she played more than any other venue, drew 753,112 people — about as many as live in Seattle.
As gigantic as they are, the figures revealed by Swift’s company are only part of the overall business that has surrounded the tour. They exclude her extraordinary merchandise sales, for example, a product line so in demand that Swift opened stadium sales booths a day early in some markets to sell T-shirts, hoodies and Christmas ornaments to fans, ticketed or not.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2024 The New York Times Company
