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The most successful tour in music history has come to an end after nearly two years on the road. As Taylor Swift winds down and her fans eagerly await any social media post that they can over-analyse for weeks on end, sports editor Adam Schmitz takes a look at the astonishing numbers behind the record-breaking Eras Tour.
Since the tour’s beginning in 2023, Swift has dominated news headlines; from being named Time’s 2023 Person of the Year to the newly coined “Swiftenomics”, which describes the impact of her tour on the economy of cities she stops in. There have even been reports of her crowd’s movement during the shows registering on the Richter Scale. Let’s take a look at some of the numbers behind this history-making tour.
$2,077,618,725 - The Eras Tour is officially the highest grossing concert tour in music history, nearly doubling the previous record held by Coldplay. Throughout the tour fans have been reported to be paying sky-high prices, with the average resale price for one of the final three shows in Vancouver going as high as $2952 (€1986).
3.5 Billion Tickets - This is the amount of ticket requests that Ticketmaster received upon their first release in November 2022. Many of these were of course bots, with Live Nation, the company in charge, still being involved in legal action against them for holding a monopoly on the industry. In the end, some ten million fans attended the tour - a record for a solo artist.
149 Shows - Swift performed 149 shows as part of the tour, in 51 cities over the course of 21 months. The highest single night attendance was 96,006 people in Melbourne, while Wembley Stadium saw the most fans overall with over 750,000 seeing Swift in London over the course of eight nights.
14 Special Guests - Fourteen special guests joined Swift on stage throughout the tour, including a number of the show’s opening acts. Phoebe Bridgers, who opened a number of the shows during the tour’s opening stint in the US, won four Grammys in 2024. Sabrina Carpenter, who also featured as an opener for the tour, ended the year with her hit, 'Espresso', being Spotify’s most streamed song of the year. Other surprise guests included Gracie Abrams, Ed Sheeran, Florence Welch from Florence + The Machine, and NFL superstar/Swift’s Boyfriend, Travis Kelce, who made a surprise appearance on stage in London as a backup dancer.
268 Songs - That’s the astonishing amount of songs Swift played on tour - essentially every song in her discography, bar six. Coming towards the end of the 46 songs on the setlist, Swift played a number of ‘Surprise Songs’ each night, giving the fans something unique to their night of the tour. The surprise songs ended up becoming one of the most iconic parts of the tour, with over one million of her devotees taking to a fan-made app Swift Alert throughout the tour to predict what each night's chosen songs would be in a Fantasy Football-esque game. The app also allowed fans to predict each show’s 15 outfit changes - with over 60 different variations of costume worn during the tour.
195 Minutes - Fans were shocked to find out that the tour clocked in at over 3 hours long. With nearly fifty songs each night spanning ten eras, Swift gave fans as much as they could ask for - prompting Billie Eilish to call concerts of such length "psychotic".
814,000 Books - The Official Eras Tour Book is 256 pages, includes over 500 images and sold nearly one million copies in just its opening weekend. Yes, that figure is just for the opening weekend. It wasn’t the only successful spinoff from the tour, with the official Eras Tour movie grossing $261 million at the box office in 2023.
6 Guinness World Records - Six Guinness World Records were awarded to Swift, all related to the incredible income from the tour, which made Swift a billionaire over the last two years. This is on top of the 38 stadium records that were set by the tour, one of which being the first tour to feature three nights in Dublin’s Aviva Stadium.
$197,000,000 - That’s the reported amount that Swift gave in bonuses to her tour crew. While dancers and band members became well known beloved figures to the fans, Swift made sure to reward every member of the team behind the tour, with truck drivers reportedly receiving a bonus of $100,000 each towards the end of 2024.
3 Albums - Taylor Swift is perhaps the biggest artist in music right now. Everything she does is heavily reported upon, praised, and criticised - often at the same time. One thing that can’t be denied is her relentless work ethic when it comes to putting out music. During The Eras Tour, Swift released three albums - and won a Grammy for album of the year. This tour created memories for millions of fans, broke hundreds of industry records and set a new standard for musicians and concerts - still no Reputation (Taylor’s Version) though…