The Taylor Swift Eras Tour Made $13 Million in a Single Year: The First Year, and it Has Confirmed Its First Year
In October 2023, she released “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” a nearly three-hour concert film, released through a direct distribution deal with AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest theater operator. It sold about $93 million in tickets during its opening weekend, and ended up with $261 million in worldwide grosses, according to Box Office Mojo. The next step was a streaming deal with Disney+. 814,000 copies of the hardcover tour book were printed in the first two days it was on sale.
The tour began in Arizona in March of 2023. Over the next 630-plus days, Swift performed 149 shows — each more than three hours long — in over 50 cities across five continents.
The 10 acts in the show are divided into five different eras of Swift’s career, each has its own color scheme, costume and stage design.
A steady stream of surprises, setlist changes and special guests held fans’ attention for the duration of the tour, with many tuning into livestreams and following dedicated fan accounts on social media.
Much has been written about “Swiftonomics,” or how the tour boosted local economies across the U.S. and around the world. Fans traveled hundreds or even thousands of miles, sometimes for more than one show, spending money on lodging, food and costumes along the way.
According to Pollstar, the first tour to make $1 billion in a single year was Eras, which made $1 billion last December. With a year left, that was what it was.
This week, after her final shows in Vancouver, the singer’s production company confirmed the tour’s total ticket sales for the first time, telling the New York Times that it had brought in a whopping more than $2 billion.
The secondary market of ticket sellers is not included, remember when a Senate hearing prompted a class-action lawsuit against the company?
The Eras Tour of Swift, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Birth of Pop Culture: The Case for the Epochal Saturation of the Swift Era
Fans trading hand- assembled friendship bracelets around the tour and the folkways that developed around it. After the tour’s stop in Kansas City, Mo., a public flirtation between Swift and Travis Kelce, the star tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs, developed into a full-on romance, with the pop star and the football hunk sharing a field-level smooch after the Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers at Super Bowl LVIII in February. The photographers definitely did not miss it.
Beyond its numbers, the Eras Tour has been a mega-event that elevated the already-super-famous Swift to a new level, making her an epochal symbol of cultural saturation on the level of the Beatles in the 1960s or Michael Jackson in his ’80s prime. Swift’s EVERY onstage utterance, outfit swap or off stage location was documented in full by news outlets big and small to capture Swifties’ clicks. Online, fans tracked every tweak to the three-hour-plus set lists.
When the tour moved to Europe in 2024, it narrowly avoided a big catastrophe when a bomb plot was discovered before three planned shows in Vienna. The events were never changed.