After setting countless milestones for attendance, sales, and cultural impact, it has now become the first concert tour ever to gross over $1 billion, with total receipts of $1.04 billion, according to music industry publication Pollstar.
The landmark tour has had around 60 stops, with more planned, making it the leading tour in gross sales both globally and in North America. Swift sold more than 4.3 million tickets at an average price of $240, meaning each stop on the tour accounted for $17.3 million in sales.
Swift’s record revenue was forecasted as far back as August after she had wrapped up the North American leg of her tour before going to Latin America. Even then the economic impact of her performances was so notable that she was cited in a July Federal Reserve’s Beige Book, a monthly analysis of economic conditions. It attributed a boost in Philadelphia’s tourism industry to her three-night tour stop in May at the city’s Lincoln Financial Stadium and said it was the best month for Philadelphia hotels since the pandemic.
During the tour, Swift generated an additional $200 million in merchandise sales, according to Pollstar. Merchandise sales are so strong that last month, Swift’s website reportedly crashed when she released her holiday themed merchandise.
In October, in addition to her live shows, Swift also released Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, a movie about her tour. The film grossed over $250 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing concert movie in history. It came at an opportune moment for the entertainment industry, and especially exhibitors, who at the time were still reeling from the dual actor and writers strikes. The movie’s release was lauded not just for its big box office success but also for creating a new business paradigm for the film industry. Swift produced the film herself and then bypassed the major film studios by negotiating a distribution deal directly with AMC Entertainment to distribute the picture. (Movie ticket sales for the Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour also crashed AMC’s app). Theaters that screened the concert film kept 43% of the gross ticket revenue with the remaining 57% going to AMC and Swift. It’s unclear how the two will split the revenues.
Swift’s blockbuster year continued this week when she was named Time’s Person of the Year. The magazine credited her financial might as setting her apart from other artists, as she became the first entertainer to win the award, usually reserved for heads of state and business titans. “While her popularity has grown across the decades, this is the year that Swift, 33, achieved a kind of nuclear fusion: shooting art and commerce together to release an energy of historic force,” Time wrote.
Over the past year, her personal life also became news fodder when she began dating NFL player Travis Kelce. Even the two-time Super Bowl winner was in awe of the billion-dollar Swift. “Obviously I’ve never dated anyone with that kind of aura about them…. I’ve never dealt with it,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
The Eras Tour is scheduled to continue into 2024, with additional stops in Asia and Europe. Pollstar predicts the second year of the tour could bring in another $1 billion.
