Over 21 months, the pop superstar's culture-dominating stage show doubled the gross of its closest competitor, according to ticket sales figures confirmed for the first time.
For the last 21 months, Taylor Swift's Eras Tour has been the biggest thing in music -- a phenomenon that has engulfed pop culture, dominated news coverage and boosted local economies around the world.
Now we know exactly how big.
Through its 149th and final show, which took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Sunday, Swift's tour sold a total of $2,077,618,725 in tickets. That's two billion and change -- double the gross ticket sales of any other concert tour in history and an extraordinary new benchmark for a white-hot international concert business.
Those figures were confirmed to The New York Times for the first time by Taylor Swift Touring, the singer's production company. While the financial details of the Eras Tour have been a subject of constant industry speculation since tickets were first offered more than two years ago -- through a presale so in-demand it crashed Ticketmaster's system -- Swift has never authorized disclosure of the tour's numbers until now.
The official results are not far from the estimates that trade journalists and industry analysts have been crunching for months. But they solidify the enormous scale of Swift's accomplishment. Just a few months ago, Billboard magazine reported that Coldplay had set an industry record with $1 billion in ticket sales for its 156-date Music of the Spheres World Tour -- a figure that is just half of Swift's total for a similar stretch of shows in stadiums and arenas.
Every date on the Eras Tour was sold out, and spare tickets were scalped at eye-popping prices -- or traded within the protective Swiftie fan community, often at face value.
According to Swift's touring company, a total of 10,168,008 people attended the concerts, which means that, on average, each seat went for about $204. That is well above the industry average of $131 for the top 100 tours around the world in 2023, according to Pollstar, a trade publication.
The biggest single night's attendance was in Melbourne, Australia, on Feb. 16, 2024, with 96,006. And Swift's eight nights at Wembley Stadium in London, which she played more than any other venue, drew 753,112 people -- about as many as live in Seattle.
As gigantic as they are, the figures revealed by Swift's company are only part of the overall business that has surrounded the tour. They exclude her extraordinary merchandise sales, for example, a product line so in demand that Swift opened stadium sales booths a day early in some markets to sell T-shirts, hoodies and Christmas ornaments to fans, ticketed or not.
And they do not count the secondary market of online ticket resellers. According to StubHub, the Eras Tour was the biggest-selling tour in the platform's two-decade history, and last year it outsold Beyoncé's shows by a factor of five. Another ticketing company, Victory Live, said the average price for resold tickets to the Eras Tour's three Vancouver dates was $2,952. (Swift earned nothing from resold tickets.)
Beyond its numbers, the Eras Tour has been a mega-event that elevated the already-super-famous Swift to a new level, making her an epochal symbol of cultural saturation on the level of the Beatles in the 1960s or Michael Jackson in his '80s prime. Swift's every onstage utterance, outfit swap or offstage sighting was thoroughly documented, on social media and in the mainstream press, with news outlets big and small rushing to capture Swifties' clicks. Online, fans tracked every tweak to the three-hour-plus set lists.
As the story of Swift's tour took shape, it seemed to contain its own eras within it. First, in November 2022, came the ticket fiasco, when Ticketmaster was overwhelmed by what it said were 3.5 billion online requests for tickets, many from scalpers' bots. The furor over those problems led to a Senate Judiciary hearing in January 2023, at which lawmakers from both parties openly called Ticketmaster's corporate parent, Live Nation, a monopoly. (This year, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against Live Nation, calling for a breakup of the company.)
Then came the tour and the folkways that developed around it, like fans trading hand-assembled friendship bracelets. After the tour's stop in Kansas City, Mo., a public flirtation between Swift and Travis Kelce, the star tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs, developed into a full-on romance, with the pop star and the football hunk sharing a field-level smooch after the Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers at Super Bowl LVIII in February. The photographers definitely did not miss it.
In October 2023, she released "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour," a nearly three-hour concert film, released through a direct distribution deal with AMC Entertainment, the world's largest theater operator. It sold about $93 million in tickets during its opening weekend, and ended up with $261 million in worldwide grosses, according to Box Office Mojo. The next step was a streaming deal with Disney+. A 256-page hardcover tour book, released last month through Target stores, sold 814,000 print copies in its first two days on sale.
As the tour moved to Europe in 2024, it narrowly avoided what could have been a major catastrophe when a terrorist bomb plot was uncovered before three planned shows in Vienna. Those events were canceled and never rescheduled.
Although Swift has largely avoided the news media during the tour, over time she has pulled back the curtain a bit to reveal some of how it came together. To prepare herself for the physical demands of the show, she trained for six months, with a cardio regimen that included singing the entire set list while running on a treadmill, she told Time magazine.
"I knew this tour was harder than anything I'd ever done before by a long shot," the magazine quoted her as saying. "I finally, for the very first time, physically prepared correctly."
The music video for "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart," from her latest album, "The Tortured Poets Department" -- her third release over the course of the tour, including two rerecorded versions of older albums -- has behind-the-scenes clips confirming some of the stagecraft mechanics that fans have carefully cataloged on social media, like how she "dives" each night through a "hole" in the stage (onto a soft cushion held by crew members) and how she is ferried backstage in a dummy janitor's cart.
The tour concludes just as Swift celebrates yet another win: "Tortured Poets" has returned to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart for a 16th week, with help from vinyl and CD sales of the 35-track "Anthology" edition of the album, which Swift released on Black Friday, also through Target. "Tortured Poets" is by far the biggest-selling album of the year so far.
Swift is up for six awards at the Grammys in February, including album of the year for "Tortured Poets" and both record and song of the year for one of its singles, "Fortnight."
At a recent tour stop in Toronto, as the tour neared its end, Swift teared up as she delivered valedictory remarks to fans.
"My band, my crew, all my fellow performers," she said, "we have put so much of our lives into this, and you put so much of your lives into being with us tonight and to giving us that moment that we will never forget."
