While Taylor Swift's music is not to our taste particularly, nor are we interested in her love life, she is a financial phenomenon. Here is more information (again, thanks to Alphinity).
"The 2024 tour, known as Eras, has sold more than $US1 billion worth of tickets; merch and music sales (even cassettes for goodness sake!) will probably add another billion on top of that. These numbers are extraordinary.
The closest gross revenue to Eras is Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, but he took five years (2018-2023) and performed 330 shows but still fell short of $US1 billion; Tay Tay is only doing 60 concerts for her billion.
The chart below (data sourced from Wikipedia) shows just how far ahead she is ahead of peers on an inflation-adjusted per-concert basis. Elton didn’t even make it into the top 15.
In addition, last year Swift released a movie version of the Eras concert to assuage the feelings of those who missed out on tickets. It is already the biggest grossing concert movie of all time, having taken more than a quarter of a billion US dollars.
Not only that, she is one of the few artists to have stared down music streaming giant Spotify, appearing on that platform on her own terms.
She also found a way around the strange situation whereby a former agent sold the copyright to her early music to a private equity firm, reclaiming a large chunk of the royalties for herself. [She re-recorded all the music from scratch].
Taylor Swift has turned out to be a very savvy business person, and a rare public figure you probably wouldn’t mind having your daughters emulate. The Trump campaign even fears that she could sway the Presidential election against him later this year.
