One Year Later, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Reaches Staggering Numbers

 

As of yesterday, it has been officially have been one year since Taylor Swift's Eras Tour kicked off in Glendale, Ariz. In the 12 months since that fateful first show, Swift has broken untold records, made history as TIME's 2023 Person of the Year, cultivated a new legion of NFL fans, and announced her forthcoming 11th studio album—The Tortured Poets Department, out April 19—among a litany of other accomplishments, according to Time magazine.

By the end of 2023—less than halfway through its scheduled 152-show run—the Eras Tour had earned over $1 billion to become the highest-grossing concert tour of all time. During that period, every city where Swift played got a substantial economic boost from the so-called "Taylor Swift effect," a term that refers to the singer's unprecedented ability to influence consumer behavior. Following the inaugural U.S. leg of Eras, the U.S. Travel Association estimated that the tour's total economic impact likely exceeded $10 billion.

In the new year, Swift's staggering popularity seems to somehow still be on the rise. Less than a week after watching her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, win the Super Bowl, Swift played to the biggest concert crowd of her career while performing at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) in Australia during the first run of 2024 Eras dates, following four shows in Tokyo.

Of her shows, 53 took place in the U.S. in 20 different cities stateside. The remaining 30 were part of the Latin America and Asia-Pacific legs of the tour. By the end of 2024, Swift is set to play a grand total of 152 Eras shows across 54 cities worldwide.

Swift played three back-to-back shows at MCG on Feb. 16, 17, and 18 that were each attended by a record 96,000 people for a three-day total of 288,000 concertgoers. Ed Sheeran, who drew a crowd of around 109,500 each of the two nights he played at MCG in 2023, still holds the venue's single-night attendance record. But that's largely due to the fact that Swift's stage setup took up more room in the arena, cutting down on the number of available seats.

Based on the approximately $17.32 million in ticket revenue Pollstar estimates Swift earned for each of the first 60 Eras dates, her total tour gross currently sits somewhere around $1.44 billion. By the end of 2024, the tour is expected to have brought in an astronomical $2.165 billion. For comparison, the second-highest grossing tour of all time, Elton John’s multi-year Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour, sold six million tickets over the course of 328 shows to earn $939 million.

According to reports from different venues, Pollstar estimates Eras attendees were spending an average of $40 per person on merch at the first 60 Eras shows. That puts Swift's tour merch revenue at an estimated $240.8 million—not including non-concert day purchases—following her first run of 2024 Eras dates.

Since its Oct. 13 release in theaters, Swift's record-breaking three-and-a-half-hour concert film has grossed $180,756,269 in North America and $261,656,269 globally at the box office. An extended edition of the movie became available to rent via video on demand services on Swift's birthday, Dec. 13, followed by the longest and most complete version of the film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (Taylor’s Version), arriving on streaming on Disney+ March 14.