Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concludes with $2.78 billion in ticket sales

Long live all the magic (and money) American superstar Taylor Swift made.

The 34-year-old singer-songwriter’s history-making The Eras Tour

ended in Vancouver, Canada, on Dec 8.

Her 149-show concert tour began in March 2023.

And the numbers are in. According to The New York Times, the tour sold a total of US$2,077,618,725 (S$2.78 billion) in tickets, which doubles the gross ticket sales of any other concert tour in history. The only other tour to cross the billion-dollar threshold is  British band Coldplay’s Music Of The Spheres World Tour, which began in March 2022 and reported a gross of more than US$1 billion in ticket sales in August.

Every show on The Eras Tour was sold out,

including the six shows Swift played at Singapore’s National Stadium

in March. More than 10 million people in total attended the concerts, which means each seat was sold, on average, at US$204.

The tour has also been credited for boosting local economies in the cities it travelled to. Singapore

negotiated an agreement for Swift’s six shows here to be her only stop in South-east Asia,

by supporting the event with an undisclosed grant.

Along with Coldplay’s six-night show at the same venue in January, the two concerts are

estimated to have generated tourism receipts of between $350 million and $450 million,

and helped bring some 4.35 million
international visitors to the Republic in the first quarter of 2024.

Swift’s blockbuster tour officially tipped her

into billionaire status in 2023,

which makes her the only musician to become a billionaire largely through her music and performances.

At her final show in Vancouver at BC Place stadium, the crowd serenaded Swift – who turns 35 on Dec 13 – with Happy Birthday after she played the ballad Champagne Problems (2020) on the piano. Swift then told the crowd that the tour had been “the adventure of a lifetime” and thanked the audience.

Swift’s crew was rewarded generously. American celebrity magazine People reported that over the course of the tour, she gave out a total of US$197 million in bonuses to everyone who worked on the tour.

This includes the band, her dancers, caterers, physical therapists and video team.

During The Eras Tour, Swift went through changes in her personal life. When the tour began, she was thought to be still with her English actor boyfriend Joe Alwyn. But the pair confirmed

their split after a six-year relationship

in April 2023.

She was then briefly linked to English singer Matty Healy, before she went public with her American football star beau, Travis Kelce.

The tour, which captures Swift’s life in “eras” based on each of her albums, went through a set list change to accommodate new songs from her latest album The Tortured Poets Department, released in April. Some meta-commentary was added to the tour with the inclusion of I Can Do It With A Broken Heart, in which Swift sings about performing amid heartbreak and personal strife.

The Eras Tour has also been a hot spot for celebrity sightings in the audience, including American stars Tom Cruise and Emma Stone, as well as Britain’s Prince William and American tennis star Serena Williams. In Singapore, K-pop stars such as Blackpink’s Lisa and Shinee’s Minho

caught Swift’s shows.