Taylor Swift‘s huge year just claimed a new record: Her “Eras” Tour generated an estimated $1.04 billion in gross ticket sales — the first tour to ever hit the billion-dollar milestone — according to the live-music trade publication Pollstar.
Swift’s tour topped all previous tours in ticket sales for the 12-month period of Nov. 17, 2022, to Nov. 15, 2023. During that time, the Eras Tour sold an estimated 4.35 million tickets from 60 shows. Beyond ticket revenues, Pollstar’s research estimated Eras Tour merchandise sales at approximately $200 million during that run.
And Swift may not be done breaking records. Pollstar projects that Eras Tour ticket sales for the next eligibility box-office year will again hit $1 billion, taking the tour’s total to more than $2 billion. That’s up from Pollstar’s previous prediction in June that Eras would rake in about $1.4 billion total gross ticket sales; Swift added dozens of shows, both in the U.S. and internationally, since that first projection.
The singer’s management has told tour trackers that it will not release any official box-office numbers from the tour, not even when it comes to a close in November 2024, so the totals are very much projections.
In contrast to Pollstar, Billboard’s Boxscore charts have only used officially submitted numbers, and without Swift’s team or the venues at which she performs revealing any results, Beyoncé’s tour has the official top receipts of 2023 on that chart, with $570.5 million. No Swift concerts appear at all on the Billboard Boxscore list of the 30 top-grossing shows of the year, due to the information blackout and that publication’s reluctance to go with estimates.
This week, the 33-year-old Swift was named Time’s Person of the Year, which she called the “breakthrough moment” of her career after her record-shattering Eras Tour and highly successful concert film that pulled in $250 million at the global theatrical box office.
After Swift’s Eras Tour, the rest of Pollstar’s top 10 rankings of worldwide tours for 2023 are: Beyoncé (No. 2), Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band (No. 3), Coldplay (No. 4), Harry Styles (No. 5), Morgan Wallen (No. 6), Ed Sheeran (No. 7), P!nk (No. 8), The Weeknd (No. 9) and Drake (No. 10).
All told, concert industry grosses for the 100 biggest tours in 2023 were up 46% to a record-breaking $9.17 billion (versus $6.28 billion last year), per Pollstar. Attendance was up 18.38% in total tickets sold to 70.1 million (versus 2022’s total of 59.2 million). In 2023, the top 100 North American tours also set a gross record with $6.63 billion (compared wit $4.77 billion last year).
According to Pollstar, all ticket sales figures are calculated in U.S. dollars and are based on actual box-office reports combined with estimated tickets sold based on venue capacities, historical Pollstar venue ticket sales data and other research. The publication is owned by Oak View Group, a global sports and entertainment venues company founded by Tim Leiweke and Irving Azoff in 2015.
