Like a free-floating planet with its own ecosystem, Taylor Swift’s Eras tour arrived in Argentina yesterday for a three-day stint at Buenos Aires’ Estadio Más Monumental.
Having boosted the US economy (adding $5 billion to US GDP) and cinema chains (the film of the tour has grossed over $100 million so far), Taylor is now poised to influence the outcome of Argentina’s presidential election. Swifties Against Freedom Advances is a group of fans co-ordinating against Javier Milei, whose Freedom Advances party relied on the youth vote to secure a slot in the runoff election on 19 November.
Separately, a recent FT headline suggested “Taylor Swift may hand out bigger bonuses than many banks this year”.
The president of Chile, the mayor of Budapest, the Canadian prime minister and the leader of Thailand’s Move Forward party have all publicly begged Swift to tour their countries, and on Sunday Israel’s foreign ministry asked for her to help find a teenage soldier kidnapped by Hamas.
No wonder the US newspaper giant Gannett, owner of USA Today, recruited its first full-time Taylor Swift correspondent this week. Read more.
The study of Swiftonomics is an exercise in through–the–looking–glass research:
- The Eras tour is set to gross $1.5 billion, making it the highest-grossing tour in history.
- Taylor paid out $55 million in bonuses at the end of the US leg of the tour, giving every truck driver a bonus of $100,000. There were 50 trucks per stage, and the Eras tour has two stages; trucks begin the transportation process more than a week before each show.
- Three hundred construction crew are hired in each city to complement the army of audio, lighting and video engineers, special effects experts, rigging engineers and projection mapping engineers.
- She has 15 dancers, six musicians and four backup singers.
- The average Eras Tour ticket costs $254 bought direct, but the average price on resale sites is around $3,800. According to the US Federal Reserve, fans spend an additional $1,300 to $1,500 on clothing, merch, food and travel.
- In Los Angeles, Swift’s six-day stop was estimated to generate enough revenue to fund 3,300 new jobs, according to the California Center for Jobs and the Economy – enough to staff every bookstore and newsstand in LA.
- The combined boost to the US economy from the Eras tour and Beyonce’s Renaissance tour in 2023 will be about $10 billion (roughly $5 billion each) – the amount agreed at Cop26 to transition South Africa to clean energy.
- On 5 November, Swift’s re-recorded version of her 1989 album overtook sales of its original release. Given that the new version is explicitly intended to regain Swift’s control of her music catalogue after the rights were sold by her former manager to a private equity group, this is a fan-controlled intervention in ownership of the means of production; most purchasers either already had the first version or could stream it.
- Swift’s Midnights was the best-selling vinyl album of 2022 and the best-selling physical album since 1991. One of every 25 vinyl records sold last year was a Taylor Swift album.