Spencer Elkind, Contributor
The world of music has been blessed throughout the decades with many a star. Once a culture dominated by bands, it is now defined by the individual artists who manage to stand out and make their music unique. Instead of names like AC/DC and Metallica, the fans of the modern era know Harry Styles and Beyonce.
In the musical world, so few artists transcend what was thought possible and enter into the broader world of popular culture to become actual stars. And yet, this summer, the world witnessed one of these stars, Taylor Swift, blaze that path around the country. She boosted economies, broke record after record, and even caused low-level earthquakes with her shows. This event was known as Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, one of the most widely impactful tours ever.
First, a bit of history courtesy of theswiftmuseum.com. Taylor Allison Swift was born in 1989 in West Reading, Pennsylvania. She started taking vocal and acting lessons at a young age and wrote her first original song when she was 12. In 2006, she signed with the independent record label Big Machine Records, releasing her first self-titled album, which would spend 275 weeks among the US Billboard top 200 Albums. She began opening for various country artists and eventually went on her first headline tour in 2008 to promote her sophomore album, which grossed an estimated 63 million dollars. Swift was awarded Album of the Year at the 52nd Grammy Awards and was recognized worldwide as one of the most talented young stars in the musical world.
Over the next decade, Taylor Swift continued to make new music and go on four additional tours, each one to promote a new studio album. She won over 150 awards, sold over 50 million albums and 150 million singles, and became the most-streamed female artist on Spotify. However, plans for a sixth tour to promote her seventh album were canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She released five more albums over the next three years (three new studio albums and two re-recorded albums after a public dispute with her former label at Big Machine Records led her to re-record all the albums she produced under them). Still, none of them would be accompanied by a tour due to the circumstances of the world.
However, that changed on November 1st, 2022, when Taylor Swift announced her sixth tour on the morning talk show Good Morning America. Unlike her other tours, this one would not be to promote a specific album but to honor her entire career and all of the eras of her life. As such, it was fittingly called the Eras Tour. An official start date was listed for March 17th, 2023, with 27 shows initially announced in 20 US cities. The news was met with widespread applause online, as her massive fanbase was eager to see these new shows. Billboard magazine described this announcement as “the most chaos-inducing tour announcement of the decade.”
The reaction to the Eras Tour as tickets went online could only be described as pandemonium. The website Ticketmaster crashed on the first day of pre-sales, leading the website to cancel further sales, which attracted so much public outcry that the US Government opened a bipartisan investigation into Ticketmaster over monopolistic concerns. Yes, the Taylor Swift Eras tour caused a full investigation into Ticketmaster by President Joe Biden and both sides of Congress. This controversy also led to intense public scrutiny against scalpers, who often use specially programmed artificial intelligence to purchase as many tickets as possible and sell them at much higher prices. If this all isn’t a demonstration of precisely the influence Taylor Swift has, then nothing is.
Popular demand quickly grew, and with it, 25 additional shows were announced, making Eras the most expansive US tour of Swift’s career.
After the initial US announcement, fans in other countries were dismayed at the lack of international dates and began to clamor for Swift to bring Eras to their cities. This also led political leaders to request this since having such a famous musical artist perform in their nations would be economically and politically beneficial. Before long, leaders from Chile, Canada, New Zealand, Thailand, and many more countries publicly called for Swift to perform in their nations, and unprecedented demand was recorded in other countries, such as Argentina and France. By the tour's end in 2024, 20 countries in Europe, Asia, and Oceania will play host to the Eras Tour. By its end, the Eras Tour would consist of 146 shows, 84 of them internationally, across three legs.
The Eras Tour officially kicked off on March 17th at the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Produced by Taylor Swift’s own production company, the tour is estimated to be one of the most expensive and technically ambitious productions of the 21st century. With an estimated length of 3 hours and 15 minutes per show, divided into 10 acts, each with its own theme, unique special effects, and wardrobe for Swift herself, the cost of the tour is almost incalculable. We do know, however, that Swift personally paid out at least 55 million dollars in bonus payments to the entire production, including the drivers of the 50 trucks needed to transport all the required equipment, as well as employing local businesses to fulfill the crew's requirements, thus generating a massive estimate for exactly how much the tour genuinely cost. The tour and cultural reaction were on their own huge. However, the tour's impact on the economy, popular culture, and industry all make the tour seem miniscule.
Of course, the Eras tour accomplished was only possible with top-tier shows. To understand precisely what Swift put together, I interviewed Hannah Everett, an Oberlin first-year student who attended two separate Eras shows. She laid out exactly what made the Eras tour so impactful, saying that “it was all those different Eras. For people who liked Taylor Swift ten years ago, she was doing songs from ten years ago. She was revisiting all those old periods, and doing that same music that made us all fall in love with her music.” She also described the “surprise songs” that changed every concert as being great for repeat viewings. Finally, Hannah emphasized the quality of the performance, saying that “it’s a production. There’s choreography, there’s dancers, it’s really cool and impressive.” Based on what Hannah has said it’s easy for us to see the quality of the show Swift put together, and how it would have such an impact on the world outside the stadiums.
Starting with the economic impacts of the tour. Eras caused a worldwide economic shock due to the increased demand for entertainment after the COVID-19 pandemic. Unprecedented ticket sale registration was reported globally, which sometimes controversially led to the implementation of laws restricting scalping. Everywhere Taylor Swift took the tour greatly benefitted the local economy by significantly boosting income for local businesses, clothing sales, transportation revenue, tourism, and the hospitality industry. The business magazine Fortune estimated that in the United States alone, consumers spent 4.6 billion dollars on purchases related to the tour.
Many economists paid particular attention to this unique economic boost, referred to as “Taylornomics” by The Wall Street Journal. Especially in the United States, which is about to enter an economic recession, experts were shocked to see Americans prioritize entertainment in this post-COVID era and how people were willing to spend extra to make up for what they missed during the pandemic years.
In popular culture, Taylor Swift launched the event of the decade. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review states, “Teens screaming and fainting for the Beatles in the mid-1960s is probably the closest equivalent to Swift-mania”. Throughout the summer, Taylor Swift dominated the news cycles, attracting celebrities across various other fields to her concerts to garner more publicity for themselves, which in turn led to their fans attending the shows as well. Taylor Swift, already one of the biggest stars of the modern music world, has done the near-impossible and expanded her reach into the entirety of our culture, a culture infused with the desire not to miss out on the latest trends.
But the influence of the era’s tour expanded far beyond the stadiums. Even right outside, one could always find tens of thousands of tailgaters who didn’t manage to get their own tickets. Virtually any piece of the tour, even the single strands of confetti used, were sold online for hundreds of dollars. Shortages for beads and sequins were quickly reported as fans made their own merchandise, with the same going for any piece of clothing resembling one of Swift's many outfits during her shows. Some fans created a virtual game called “Swiftball,” which attracted 11 thousand participants at one time. And in July, the sheer number of people dancing at one of Swift’s concerts in Seattle caused seismic activity equal to a 2.3 magnitude earthquake, which the Western Washington University recorded as being twice as strong as anything Seattle had seen from raving fans before.
This tour represents, on a fundamental level, at least for me, the full recovery of giant worldwide events like this after the pandemic. Even eighteen months ago, this would not have been possible for various pandemic-related reasons. Still, the fact that Eras has become such a success represents that the world has finally recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic and returned to the kind of massive events we used to hold before that. With that in mind, it’s possible to see Eras as a victory party for all the world, a celebration of humanity’s victory over nature DJ’d by one of the greatest voices in musical history. To me, that’s what Eras represents about our culture: our sense of victory, and that’s why it became such a huge cultural phenomenon.
And finally, there’s one more area in which Taylor Swift and her tour had a surprising effect: Hollywood. Throughout her career, Swift has always released filmed versions of her concerts to coincide with whatever tour is ongoing, but typically, these films just aired on cable. For Eras, Swift decided to give her concert movie a theatrical release, allowing people who couldn’t make it to the shows to experience Eras in a nearby theater.
While this usually wouldn’t capture the press’s attention for any more than a few days, there are two reasons it produced such a shockwave in the entertainment industry. Firstly, she chose to do this during a historic double strike, as the unions representing Hollywood actors and writers fought for higher wages and more job security, closing down much of the industry. Secondly, Swift, a member of SAG-AFTRA herself, refused to distribute the film through any of the studios being struck, instead going directly to theater chains to get the film out to the people. Now Eras is set to release in theaters on October 13th, 2023, and is expected to generate a profit that rivals modern-day blockbuster hits.
The arrival of this film has even led some studios to shift their release dates to avoid Swift’s concert film. After the widely publicized “Barbenheimer” trend of the summer led to many other films underperforming, studios aren’t willing to rechallenge the power of cultural phenomenon. But this move raises several questions about the industry as a whole: Has Swift completely turned the distribution ladder of Hollywood upside down? How will this benefit theaters as movies that can’t be promoted vacate the calendar? And what will the performance of a concert film say about the state of Hollywood movies right now? Unfortunately, until the movie opens, these questions will go unanswered.
As we reach the present day, Taylor Swift has completed the first United States leg of the tour and is preparing to take the event around the world. Next, she will perform in 20 countries before returning to the US for the final shows next October. The Eras tour and its impact on our modern society is far from over. But with how impactful this tour already is less than halfway through its duration, one can only imagine what effects it will have on us by its end. One thing is for sure: Eras has cemented Taylor Swift as one of the premiere celebrities not just of the musical world, but of all time, and this tour is nothing less than her magnum opus.