Taylor Swift mania continues to spread across the world like a contagious disease. The incredibly popular singer and serial dater has been printing money with her “Eras” Tour, and it looks like she’s going to hit a pretty impressive sales threshold: $2 billion in ticket sales in North America alone.
That’s a lot of tickets. CNN is reporting that her tour could very well be the highest grossing tour of all time. The sales represent all of the primary sales for the first leg of her tour and a second leg next year.
The data comes courtesy of research firm QuestionPro, who calculated the total using the average price of first sale tickets – $455.78, for 68 total shows on the continent.
The average attendance for each show? It’s 72,459. The survey didn’t consider whether people only bought one ticket or multiple, but it’s hard to argue with numbers like that. All of that together adds up to a healthy $2.2 billion, making it the highest we’ve seen so far. The previous highest grosser? Elton John.
His “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour grossed $887 million, and that took five years (2018 to 2023). The thing about Swifties is they don’t just buy tickets, they buy hotel rooms and outfits and take Ubers and eat at the show.
The survey from QuestionPro asked 862 people what they spent their money on during the “Eras” tour, and it was a significant amount. They spend about $292 on outfits, $214 on merchandise and $131 for consumables. On top of the tickets!
Are all Swift fans wealthy, or am I just really poor? No one answer that. This means that Swift isn’t just an incredibly popular musician, she’s an “economic phenomenon,” according to SeatGeek growth marketing director Chris Leyden.
“Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras’ tour is rewriting the playbook of entertainment economics,” he said.
Even more impressive is the resale price of a ticket, which averages about $1,600 dollars. Her last tour resale price was $191. That’s a 74% increase. Also, the tour is kind of just getting started. She still has to go overseas all around the world and then come back to the states for another jag. She has newly recorded albums coming out too.
Perhaps sensing that all this money would make her look out-of touch (authenticity is the core of the Swiftie love), she gave her truck drivers $100,000 checks each. Whether or not that was a PR ploy or not it’s brilliant and it makes her look really good and not at all an out of touch billionaire like Jeff Bezos.
We’ll let you know when she inevitably grosses another billion.
Published: Aug 17, 2023 05:13 pm