By Avery Sharp

The Eras Tour has swept the globe, grossing a record-breaking $4.1 billion so far. How has this tour become a global success and a new level in Taylor Swift’s career? Well, society’s craving for normalcy through entertainment is a large contributing factor in the success of the Eras Tour. We went from being free to becoming extremely isolated in the last four years, before returning to some sort of regularity. During that extreme isolation, people used music as comfort and entertainment.

Being able to go out and hear artists live has answered the longing and craving that everyone has for human connection. This creates the general idea that people will spend significant amounts of money to satisfy that longing.

If we look at Taylor Swift’s career before COVID, she was due to start touring her 2019 album in June 2020. Inevitably, she had to cancel. When the announcement of the Eras Tour came out in late 2022, fans knew that it would be her first tour since 2017–2018. Thus, Swifties were naturally very excited.

To really evaluate and understand the success of Taylor Swift in the last year, we have to look back to her 7th studio album, Lover. Released in August of 2019, it sold over 1 million copies and extended her record as the longest-running number-one act. With its commercial success, there was no doubt that Swift was going to have another big stadium tour.

That was until March 2020 rolled around, and our world changed forever.

Fast forward to July 24, 2020, Taylor Swift dropped her eighth studio album, folklore. Unlike her previous albums, folklore is a more folk-pop-sounding record; a new sound for Swift. Despite the lack of publicity leading up to this album, it reached 80.6 million global streams on Spotify in its first day. This album was just as successful as Lover, despite the fact that Lover was marketed prior to its release.

As you can see, Swift was still gaining success and popularity despite being in the music industry for 14 years and having yet another genre shift from pop over to folk-pop. In December 2020, Taylor released yet another folk-pop album, evermore, an encore surprise announcement. Commercially, it was still successful, but not as triumphant as folklore or Lover, though still hitting #1 on the Billboard 200.

Between 2020 and 2022, Swift released her re-records of Fearless and Red. Those were successful among her Swiftie fan base, but nothing compared to her following record, Midnights, Swift’s most successful album to date. It broke sales records, streaming records, and much more. Midnights holds the record for the most streamed album in a single day, with 186 million streams on Spotify. The album surpassed 700 million streams within a week of its release (the fastest album to ever do so).

That brings us to the Eras Tour, which is arguably the most successful tour in history, to date. November 2022 was the beginning of ticket sales for the Eras tour. In the initial presale, the tour sold over 2.4 million tickets on the first day, for U.S. tour dates only. It is estimated that, as of December 2022, the tour had already grossed over 500 million dollars. By the end of this year, that number is projected to surpass 2 billion.

So how did this happen? How did it become so successful? For one, the albums she released in the post-Reputation era had a huge impact on her success on this tour; 60+ new songs, most of which had never been sung live prior to the Eras Tour. Her growing success expanded her fandom significantly, thus creating more density in ticket sales. A second factor was the fact that this was her first tour since the 2017–2018 Reputation Stadium Tour. The anticipation to see what she would perform, what she would wear, and more created a national demand for tickets among American fans.

International sales had a different reason for their success: social media, specifically TikTok. As of March 2023, the Eras Tour had blown up on social media, showcasing the three-hour show, songs from every era, surprise songs, her outfits, the anticipation leading up to the show, picking your outfit, etc. All of this popularity among various types of videos resulted in a bandwagon effect. It became a trend to attend the Eras Tour, which, depending on your perspective, isn’t a bad thing.

Connection and normalcy are the last main reasons for the global success of the Eras Tour. Since being shut down in March of 2020, everyone has craved that feeling of going back to normal. Being able to be in a space with lots of people again is something that the majority of society has desired for so long. Look at Harry Styles’ Love on Tour, The Weeknd’s After Hours Tour, Ed Sheeran’s Mathematics Tour, Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour, and many more.

Though none of these were as commercially successful as the Eras Tour, they still found great success due to society’s inability to have those experiences for 2 years.

The Eras Tour is one of the most critically acclaimed and globally successful tours in music history. The time gap between her last tour, the release of four new studio albums, social media, and the removal of COVID-19 restrictions all contributed to this massive triumph.

With all this success, I’m interested to see what the future holds for the Eras Tour and the concert industry. Will the concert phenomenon eventually die down, or will it continue to grow and expand in the coming years? These are all things to think about in the coming future when looking at the success of concerts and the Eras Tour.