Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour is headed for a couple of important benchmarks that have a “B” attached, according to a report in Pollstar. As the global trek moves on from America and proceeds to Europe in 2024, it will assuredly become the first tour in the history of the business to gross a billion dollars. It won’t stop there, though; Pollstar is estimating that the final gross will wind up around $1.4 billion.
The live music trade publication concedes that it is doing a fair amount of estimating on current and future grosses, but says its “crack numbers team” believes the tour will cross the historic $1 billion mark at some point during Swift’s shows in Singapore, which will take place during the March 2-9, 2024 window.
But the tour still has a long way to go after that before it wraps up (barring extensions) at Wembley Stadium in London on Aug. 17, 2024. By that point, Pollstar writes, the Eras Tour will have grossed $1.4B — a figure the publication pegs as being on the “conservative” side.
Pollstar may actually have to revise its numbers upwards, already; since the trade’s report was published earlier this week, a number of dates have been added to the European tour routing. For instance, Pollstar’s story mentions a three-night stand in Singapore, whereas just within the last few days she added three more shows there to arrive at a total of six. (She even just added one last show in the U.S., a sixth night at L.A.’s SoFi Stadium, this week.)
Bear in mind that the “conservative” $1.4 billion estimate is just counting the face value of the tickets as they originally sold out. The actual amount of money being spent on the Swift tour by consumers is far, far higher, with nearly all resold tickets going on the secondary market for several times their original value. Pollstar’s figures cover only the face value of the tickets, which topped out under $500. The Swift camp is not the recipient of the jacked-up prices that have seen virtually all tickets now on the market in the U.S. selling into the four figures. Without any hoopla about it, Swift turned off the “platinum pricing” option on Ticketmaster that proved so controversial on the Bruce Springsteen tour, wherein artists’ camps benefit from escalating face value.
The average face value for Swift’s nightly concert tickets in the U.S., according to Pollstar, has been $253.56 — a fraction of their IRL value, as it has turned out. Needless to say, though, being in line to become music’s biggest grosser on a single tour, Swift probably isn’t spending much time lamenting her decision to forego dynamic pricing.
Whose record will she be beating? That of Elton John, whose “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour is said by Billboard to be at the $887 million mark — and still counting, but just barely, since that tour is scheduled to wrap up in just over than a week, on July 8 in Stockholm. It was in January of this year that Elton’s tour became the first to cross the $800 million mark.
Prior to Elton pushing ahead, the previous record was held by Ed Sheeran, whose Divide Tour grossed $776.4 million over a period of several years. U2’s 360 tour was on top, historically, before Sheeran moved up.
Pollstar says Swift would have had a shot at passing the billion-dollar mark in a single calendar year if she had kept on touring through the end of 2023. But she chose to take a two-and-a-half-month break between her 13 shows in Latin America, which start in Mexico City on Aug, 13 and wind up Nov. 26 in Brazil, and resuming the tour early next year in Tokyo on Feb. 7, heading through Asia, Australia and ultimately Europe.
The dollars related to the tour that have nothing to do with tickets are impressive, too. Pollstar cites an online research group, QuestionPro, as estimating the U.S. leg of the tour will generate $5 billion in economic impact in the cities where she tours (“more than the gross domestic product of 50 countries”).
