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Taylor Swift, imperfect capitalist?
The pop star could have made even more money from her $2bn tour
TAYLOR SWIFT’S Eras tour has been the juggernaut of live music for almost two years. Since it began in March 2023, more than 10m tickets have been sold for 149 shows across five continents. At the end of last year, Eras became the first tour to gross over $1bn. The final tally is expected to be double that.
But has Ms Swift earned the title (bestowed on her by the Spectator, a British weekly) of “queen of capitalism”? Before the tour began, critics and fans lambasted her for expensive ticket prices. The face value of tickets started at $49 and went up to more than $899 in America. But secondary-market prices suggest Ms Swift could have charged even more. Resale tickets in America and Canada fetched an average of $839—more than the face value of some of the best seats.
One lucky Swiftie bought four tickets to her show in Rio for just $15, making each ticket less than $4. The most expensive single ticket sold in Indianapolis, where one fan forked out $10,400 to see the show from the floor. The Circle City does not just hold the record for the most expensive resale ticket: its median ticket price was $1,371, the highest out of all tour stops (see chart).
Data suggest that to maximise revenue from her tour, Ms Swift should have added more dates in America and Canada, where demand was highest. Instead, she made 17 stops in Europe, before returning stateside in the run-up to the final show in Canada. On the resale market, the average ticket to a European show went for $385, less than half the price in America and Canada. The reason may not simply be less demand; some European venues capped resale prices. And because Europeans generally earn less than Americans, they are less likely to pay top dollar.
But Ms Swift’s tour did not just offer economic benefits to resellers. The difference in prices created an arbitrage opportunity for Americans. The cost of attending a show in Paris, including flights and accommodation, could still be on average $250 cheaper than attending one in New York. Many American Swifties did just that; an estimated 20% of the audience at the Paris shows was American. The influx of tourists is estimated to have brought cities that hosted concerts an additional $50m-100m in economic activity.
What makes Ms Swift’s success remarkable is that after almost two years of touring, demand for her shows has not slackened. Instead fans are even more eager to see the show than they were in 2023; secondary-market tickets for the last stop in America (Indianapolis) cost $1,273 more than for her first stop (Glendale). By comparison, the median resale ticket for Beyonce’s first American show in 2023 cost $182; by the final show, it had fallen to $109. And the median resale ticket price for the closing night of Sir Elton John’s recent farewell tour—one of the longest-running and the third highest-grossing tour in the world—was $187, one seventh of the price of tickets for Ms Swift.
So is Ms Swift a shrewd capitalist? She is expected to pocket almost $10m from each date of her tour. But a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that had Ms Swift been able to price her tickets at resale value (via an ingenious online auction, say) and perhaps swapped Paris for Miami, she would have made an additional $50m per date—boosting her takings four- or five-fold. But it is not all about money in the short term. Her tour has been optimised not just for takings but for (social) media attention and popularity. “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it,” goes some sage advice from Warren Buffett, head of an investment firm (and an exemplary capitalist). Pricing her tickets higher and slashing stops in Europe or South America would have brought short-term gains but might have cost her that good name. And no one knows better that it can be hard to shake off a bad reputation.
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Business NewsGlobalTaylor Swift, imperfect capitalist?
First Published:7 Feb 2025, 02:53 PM IST
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