Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour changed everything

The pop-music sensation accounts for nearly 2% of the U.S. music market—more than any other artist. Even in today’s splintered media landscape, where top acts can go unnoticed by swaths of the public, she’s a cultural phenomenon on par with Michael Jackson in the 1980s and the Beatles in the 1960s.

“I don’t know that anyone will ever be as famous or as hugely successful as Taylor Swift ever again," said Miranda Reinert, a host of the music podcast Endless Scroll. “I think Taylor is the last."

What transformed this 30-something country-turned-pop singer into a musical deity? The Eras Tour.

The global, stadium-sized odyssey has fueled the most inescapable, all-consuming music mania of the 21st century. On Dec. 8, after five continents, roughly 10 million tickets and revenue that could be around $2 billion, based on ticket-sales figures from previous Wall Street Journal reporting, the trek finally comes to a close with a show in Vancouver, Canada.

Swift’s Broadway-influenced concerts take fans on a journey across her nearly two-decade career. But unlike the typical retrospective, they deliver two Taylor Swifts at once—the “legacy" act in her imperial phase, looking back on the past; and the “current" artist, marching into the future with new products such as her 2024 album, “The Tortured Poets Department."

Music executives say Swift has raised the bar for the concert industry, not just with ticket and merchandise sales, but conceptual ambition, stage production, wardrobe and news-cycle penetration.

Here, eight ways Swiftmania is likely to change concerts forever:

Catapulting the Next Wave of Concert Acts

Swift’s opening-act slots on the 149-date Eras Tour functioned like an incubator for up-and-coming Swiftian stars.

The biggest examples are Sabrina Carpenter and Gracie Abrams, new pop stars who were directly boosted by their Eras Tour participation.

Abrams, who saw a steady increase in Spotify monthly listeners between 2020 and 2023, suddenly experienced a mini-spike ahead of her first stint opening for Swift last year, according to music-analytics firm Chartmetric. Then, ahead of her 2024 opening gigs, she experienced a much bigger spike, which took her monthly listeners from roughly 10 million to upward of 30 million.

Carpenter, who opened for Swift between late August 2023 and early March 2024, has seen a 117% jump in Spotify monthly listeners this year, through Nov. 23. Smaller artists can see even bigger pops: Owenn, a less-known opener, saw a 246% increase in Spotify monthly listeners within a week of the Eras Tour announcement in November 2022, according to Chartmetric’s Alejandra Arevalo.

Minting new stars “is the biggest problem in the music business—and she just solved it," said Marcie Allen, a music-industry brand strategist with MAC Consulting who handled Swift’s first two brand deals.

Popularizing the Super-Long Pop Concert

At a time when music fans are increasingly complaining about high ticket prices and fees, Swift’s lengthy live shows may offer a way to calm them down.

Swift fans have been happily spending hundreds and even thousands of dollars for tickets—in some cases for multiple dates. One reason is the three-hour-and-15-minute-plus running time of the Eras Tour spectacle, which, paired with Swift’s lavish production, gives fans the feeling they’re getting bang for their buck. While rock stars like Bruce Springsteen and Guns N’ Roses have long delivered marathon shows, Swift is pioneering that practice in the pop realm.

“With the cost of ticket prices today, the longer concert is necessary to support the price of attendance," said Sonal Shah, 50, a certified public accountant in Rockville, Md., who attended two Eras Tour shows in Philadelphia and Indianapolis with her 18-year-old daughter, Devani. “For Taylor, we paid face value for both shows and I definitely feel like we got our money’s worth," Shah said.

“The Eras Tour raised the standard for other artists by pushing them to perform for longer and add more entertaining aspects to their shows," said Devani Shah, who’s listened to Swift since kindergarten. “I feel like I saw not only a concert, but a show."

Understanding What Women Want

Women have loved live music from time immemorial, but the Eras Tour underscored just how much they will show up in huge numbers for the right event, as well as how much they represent a not-entirely-tapped market for the concert industry.

Football stadiums are notoriously masculine spaces. Yet, night after night during Swift’s tour, girls, young women and older fans transformed them into a celebration of femininity and a reclamation of girlhood, reinforcing what’s been apparent to anyone tracking culture: Women are the center of pop music.

“Everyone is so nice at the Eras Tour," which creates a “family-like" feeling, said Courtney Johnston, 26, who co-runs the X account @ErasTourResell, which has helped fans get tickets at face value so they wouldn’t be taken advantage of by scalpers. “You don’t really experience that at other concerts."

For years, Swift has devoted herself to portraying the universal female experience, both by co-writing or writing her own songs and by zeroing in on her feelings, fantasies and insecurities, moves that stood out in an industry that often sexualizes and objectifies women. That vibe has rubbed off on her concerts, where any aggressiveness (pushing to the front of the stage, for example) seemed overshadowed by a powerful feeling of community.

Sonal Shah said the Eras Tour brought mothers and daughters together (fathers, too).

“We shopped for outfits, made our friendship bracelets and made a TikTok," Shah said. “For me, this was an extra special experience because [Devani] will be going off to college next year."

The Rise of DIY Merch

Perhaps the most visible aspect of the “sense of girlhood" at Eras, as Johnston put it, are the outfits and accessories.

A popular tradition at Swift’s shows has been making and exchanging beaded friendship bracelets: At one of her New York-area concerts, a fan politely gave this reporter’s 8-year-old daughter a bracelet of her own.

Concertgoers have also dressed up in honor of their favorite Taylor Swift album or era, further popularizing an “event-dressing" trend that some Swifties have always been into.

“It’s kind of the equivalent of going to the home game for a sports team, where people are wearing all the different jerseys and shirts that support their favorite players," said Nathan Hubbard, co-founder of music company Firebird and co-host with Nora Princiotti of the podcast “Every Single Album," which has covered Swift extensively.

Tailoring the Concert for the Social-Media Age

The Eras Tour didn’t just aim to please 70,000 fans each night—it was tailor-made for social media, with Swift’s recurring mini-set of surprise songs keeping audiences glued to their screens.

For those at the show, Swift’s surprise songs made each concert unique. With many fans excited to capture a highlight they can show their followers, Swift’s strategy meant a gusher of shareable TikTok moments. “It’s genius, in my opinion," Johnston said.

Other artists like Sabrina Carpenter have been doing something similar to Swift. In the past, Carpenter did a bit where she performed a unique, customized outro to her song “Nonsense" every night; she brought that bit to the Eras Tour when she opened. More recently, on her current “Short n’ Sweet" tour, Carpenter shows off different sex positions that change from concert to concert during her song “Juno."

For Swift, this kind of playful fan service is actually a new version of an old move: Back on her 2011-12 “Speak Now" tour, before social media was so widespread, Swift excited hardcore fans by wearing different song lyrics—say, from a Joni Mitchell tune—on her arms.

Normalizing the Mini-Residency Approach

Eras was Swift’s most extensive tour ever, but though it felt ubiquitous, she didn’t actually hit all the places superstars typically play. Instead, she combined traditional touring with a “mini-residency" approach, a striking decision for a performer swimming in demand for shows.

“Harry Styles started it—she finished it," MAC Consulting’s Allen said, referring to Styles’s use of the mini-residency model a few years back.

For example, Swift stayed put in Los Angeles for six nights but didn’t stop at all in Washington, D.C. In Asia, she played Singapore and Japan; for fans in, say, Indonesia, it was tough luck.

Another aspect of Swift’s touring was that it focused on weekends, which, like the mini-residency model, gave her more time to rest, boosting her stamina.

Swift can do things her way because she does many of them herself. She has her own in-house tour production team, which handles her show, though she also works with Messina Touring Group, a partner of AEG Presents, the world’s second-biggest promoter.

When Swift released her Eras Tour concert film, she bypassed Hollywood studios and partnered directly with a theater company, AMC Entertainment. AMC later announced a similar deal for Beyoncé.

Giving a Boost to Music Tourism

Plenty of fans fly to Las Vegas to see their favorite artist in residency, but the Eras Tour encouraged something different: Flying far away to see a stadium show.

Due to the considerable difficulty nabbing Taylor tickets, some U.S. fans ended up traveling to Europe, where prices are generally lower, executives said. After all, if it’s cheaper all-in, why not see Taylor Swift and France? And because Swift wasn’t playing New Zealand, fans there scrambled to buy flights to Australia; fans in Thailand flew to Singapore.

The resulting boost to tourism—even within the U.S.—gave her concert tour even more economic punch.

Fans hitting cities for Swift’s shows packed hotels, restaurants, bars and other local businesses, especially if they were in town for a few days. When Swift touched down in Chicago, the number of hotel rooms occupied there broke a record, according to tourism and marketing organization Choose Chicago. Las Vegas’ tourism authority said Swift’s concerts returned the city’s visitor levels to nearly prepandemic levels.

Placing Ticketmaster in the Crosshairs

After Swift’s U.S. Eras Tour sale crashed Ticketmaster’s site in November 2022, scrutiny of the company, which is owned by concert-promotion behemoth Live Nation Entertainment, jumped into high gear.

Some fans were so incensed that they started selling T-shirts and other merchandise criticizing Ticketmaster (“Ticketmaster Broke My Heart"). The debacle prompted bipartisan criticism in Congress, including hearings on the matter, along with a Justice Department civil antitrust lawsuit threatening to break up Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which merged in 2010.

Ticketmaster, which apologized to Swift, has blamed the huge number of fans trying to buy tickets at the same time and an unusual spate of bot attacks.

While the Eras Tour might be ending, the future of Ticketmaster remains unclear: In August, 10 more states joined the Justice Department’s Live Nation lawsuit. Yet Live Nation’s stock has soared in recent months, which suggests some investors view a breakup as slightly less likely in a Trump administration.

Where Does Swiftmania Head Next?

Of course, the big question for Swifties now probably isn’t about Ticketmaster so much as what happens next for the soon-to-be 35-year-old singer-songwriter.

Might Swift, like Adele, build her own specialized music venue? Unearth her pandemic-scrapped plans for a festival? And when will the last two albums in her re-recordings project, including 2017’s career highlight “Reputation," come out?

Given how hard Swift has been working on the live-music circuit recently, some of these questions may have to wait.

“That’s been a long f— tour," Adele said recently of Swift’s shows, during the final concert of her own Las Vegas residency.

“She deserves her rest."

Write to Neil Shah at Neil.Shah@wsj.com