For decades, ever since the birth of pop music really, it’s generally acknowledged that music stars are not making bank from selling their music, but rather from touring. Music sales are complicated and everyone gets a cut, especially nowadays in the Spotify/streaming era. An artist can be streamed tens of millions of times and they’re only making a small fraction of what they should earn. Tours are much more profitable and straightforward, organized by the artist and their team. Profitable not just from ticket sales, but from the ultra-lucrative merchandising. Well, I don’t know the exact breakdown, but Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour blew every record to smithereens, from ticket sales to merchandising.

For the last 21 months, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has been the biggest thing in music — a phenomenon that has engulfed pop culture, dominated news coverage and boosted local economies around the world. 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 two 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 — through a presale so in-demand it crashed Ticketmaster’s system — 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.

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.

[From The NY Times]

“Phenomenon” gets thrown around a lot, but holy sh-t, the Eras Tour was a phenomenon, as is Taylor herself. Think about how she did this too – she dropped Midnights as her relationship with Joe Alwyn was coming to a close, she announced the tour and the sales went through the roof, and she just committed nearly two full years of her life to all of this. AND she released another album in the middle of it, not to mention cycling through Matt Healy and starting up with Travis Kelce. It’s also amazing that Taylor had a great team around her and there were zero catastrophes. I mean, yeah, there was a terrorism threat in Europe and there were climate issues, but none of that was her fault or her team’s fault. Over $2 billion in ticket sales alone. Probably that much in merch sales too. Seriously, congrats to Taylor and her team.

Additionally, People Magazine had an exclusive about the bonuses Taylor hands out to her tour crew. It looks like Taylor’s touring production company decided to confirm a lot of news after her last Eras concert, right? People Mag says that Taylor “gave out $197 million in bonuses to everyone working on her tour — including truck drivers, caterers, instrument techs, merch team, lighting, sound, production staff and assistants, carpenters, dancers, band, security, choreographers, pyrotechnics, riggers, hair, make-up, wardrobe, physical therapists and video team.” So, she gave out bonuses which were just shy of 10% of the total ticket sales. Say there were 1000 people working to ensure the tour ran smoothly – that’s roughly $200K per person just in bonuses, in addition to their salaries.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.