Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour comes to an end: a look at its massive global impact
When Taylor Swift played Edinburgh in June, the effect was quite literally seismic. When the pop star played ‘… Ready For It?’ at the Scottish capital’s 73,000-capacity Murrayfield Stadium, energy caused by fans dancing peaked and created 80kW of power.
So, it’s really no exaggeration to say that the Eras Tour, which came to an end on Sunday (December 8), had an earth-shaking impact – not just in Edinburgh (and Los Angeles and Seattle last year) but on our musical and cultural landscape today. Kicking off in Glendale, Arizona in March 2023 and concluding December 2024 in Vancouver, the 149 dates saw over 10million attendees in total and took in a staggering $2billion in ticket sales.
The Eras Tour covered North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australasia in its two-year march around the globe, and everywhere it went it was a spectacle. Each show was an event, with fans flying in and spending months preparing outfits themed to their favourite Era. The Swiftmania was apparent at a glance: a sea of sequins and feathers, arms covered in friendship bracelets and the thunderous clip-clop of hundreds of pairs of metallic cowboy boots. Community formed around the Eras Tour, as fans met in the queue and shared in-jokes with Swift on-stage (like the yell of “1, 2, 3, let’s go, bitch!” in ‘Delicate’); online, Swifties pored over footage of her surprise song segments, bonding over inspired song and outfit choices.
Everyone wanted a piece of the Eras Tour, with the likes of Hugh Grant, Paul McCartney and Prince William all attending in the past year. So tremendous was the demand from the start that chaotic Ticketmaster sales for the US dates in November 2022 lit a huge flame under the long-simmering conversation around concert ticket sales. The pre-sale for the US tour dates saw fans frustrated by tech disruptions and long wait times, and days later, the general sale was axed at the last minute due to “extraordinarily high demand”.
Swift put out a statement (where she commented “we asked them multiple times if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could”), an antitrust investigation was initiated and a US Senate hearing held in 2023. The story continues to develop: in May 2024, the Department of Justice sued Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, alleging “unlawful, anticompetitive conduct”; the company responded calling the suit “baseless” and an attempt at a “PR win”.
The scale of the Eras Tour could also be measured in its impact on local economies. Where the show rolled into town, cities saw financial bumps that some economists dubbed the ‘TSwift Lift’; others called it Swiftonomics. Whatever you named it, the impact was major: in Britain, it was reported that the Eras Tour would add about £1billion to the economy. Singapore’s GDP was estimated to have boosted by over $200million due to its six sold-out shows, secured via an exclusivity deal that made it the only Eras Tour stop in Southeast Asia. The arrangement nearly became a geopolitical issue, with nearby countries in the region criticising the deal as “unfriendly” and not “what good neighbours do”.
And what of the show itself? The three-hour Eras Tour spectacle, with its career-spanning setlist and extensive stage production, received acclaim from fans, critics and Swift’s musical peers alike. The National’s Aaron Dessner – who regularly collaborates with Swift – pronounced it to NME “the greatest show I’ve seen”.
“It’s just insane, the scale of the tour,” he added. “And the music, the visual design, the choreography and her musicianship, it’s on a level that I’ve never seen anything like. To me, it’s something to aspire to: to be that ambitious with her music.”
Meanwhile, Gracie Abrams, who supported Swift during the tour, reflected: “She makes everyone feel seen and heard, and she also at different points in the shows makes it feel like an intimate venue despite the fact that there are 80,000 or 100,000 people sharing the space.”
When the tour was turned into a film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, it also smashed records. Filmed at the Los Angeles stops of the tour and released in October 2023, in a matter of months it became the highest-grossing concert film of all time, beating Michael Jackson’s This Is It. When the movie began streaming on Disney+ in March this year – as a “Taylor’s Version” cut with four additional songs – it set a record there, too.
Swift’s decision to re-record her first six albums to regain ownership of her master recordings has sent waves through the music industry – and the Eras Tour film has become another example of Swift and her team flexing business acumen with potential industry-wide impact. As Christopher Nolan has commented, the film’s distribution – a direct collaboration between Swift and AMC Theatres – was an “incredible lesson” for studios. And it was a similar story for the recently published Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour Book, a glossy coffee table tome that was published via Taylor Swift Publications, instead of one of the major publishing houses.
After two history-making years on the road, it’ll be intriguing to see what Swift does next. She’s apparently due to direct her own feature film for Searchlight Pictures, and of course, there are still two “Taylor’s Version” re-recorded releases on the cards (fans are convinced she’s been teasing ‘Reputation (Taylor’s Version)’ while on tour). And next year Swift could smash her own Grammy record, as ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ has been nominated for Album of the Year; if it wins, she will become the only artist ever to win the trophy five times, surpassing… herself.
Or could there be brand-new music? As a prolific writer, with the newfound downtime Swift could very well head back to the studio and pen album number 12. Which leads to a further question: if there is new music, what could the next Taylor Swift tour look like? After the gargantuan, culture-defining Eras Tour, it’s hard to fathom what Swift’s future as a live performer holds. Is it another tour of that scale or something entirely different? Or is there still another way we’ve yet to experience the Eras Tour – through the form of a live album, perhaps? No matter the answers to these questions, one thing is for sure: as we reach the end of the road, Taylor Swift’s next Era is set to begin.
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Hannah Mylrea
NME
