Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour On Track to Be Her Top-Selling Yet
Written by djfrosty on November 1, 2022
Taylor Swift, in case you haven’t heard, is back. Her 10th studio album, Midnights, was released on Oct. 21 and moved 1.578 million album equivalents in its first week of release in the U.S. according to Luminate, the most since Adele’s 25 seven years ago. The album’s standard edition blanketed the Billboard Hot 100 in unprecedented fashion, occupying the chart’s entire top 10 positions. And now, she has officially announced the Eras Tour, playing stadiums in the U.S. throughout 2023.
Swift is no stranger to the stadium stage. Her last tour, 2018’s Reputation Stadium Tour, played 53 shows, earning $345.7 million and sold 2.9 million tickets, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore.
That was enough to make it the highest-grossing and most-attended tour of Swift’s career. She had leveled up from 2015’s The 1989 World Tour, which itself had bested The Red Tour (2013-14). From theaters to arenas to stadiums, and from smaller Midwest markets to global reach, each of Swift’s official five treks have out-grossed and out-sold the one before.
The Reputation Stadium Tour reached career-high status by staying true to its name, sticking to stadiums in all four continents that it played. Swift averaged more than 50,000 paid tickets in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America, doubling her previous high in Asia and quadrupling the nightly attendance from her previous run in Europe.
To do so, the stadium-branded tour played it smart. She played 53 shows worldwide, consolidated from the 80-plus dates on The 1989 World Tour and The Red Tour, forcing high(er) demand on an exclusive routing. In Europe, she stuck to three markets in the U.K., and in Asia only played two shows in Tokyo.
Still, Swift played 38 shows in the U.S., breaking her own record for the highest-grossing stateside tour of all time (the record has since been broken by Elton John). With an even more sparse calendar in 2023 so far, Swift will challenge herself to, once again, outdo herself.
The Eras Tour announced 27 stadium shows in the U.S. (Swift assured fans that international shows would be announced at a later date), beginning March 18 in Glendale, Arizona, and wrapping with an on Aug. 4-5 double-header in Inglewood, California. If Swift were to replicate Reputation’s $7 million nightly domestic average, the tour would earn $189.1 million and sell 1.47 million tickets.
But those figures are based on Reputation’s $128.67 average ticket price. In the time since that tour closed, platinum ticketing, dynamic pricing and inflation have changed the potential for sky-high ticket prices, especially for a stadium A-lister like Swift.
And while the initial routing for Eras is light, the time between its March kickoff and August finale is wide open. Swift is only scheduled to play one or two shows a week, leaving ample room for additional markets and, just as likely, additional shows in the cities she’s already announced. Depending on demand in the two and a half weeks between registration for Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program and the tour’s general on-sale, Swift’s schedule could bulk up.
And why wouldn’t it? In the time since the Reputation Stadium Tour wrapped in 2018, she has topped the Billboard 200 with six albums and crowned the Hot 100 four times. She was nominated for the Grammy for album of the year three years in a row, winning in 2021 for Folklore. Between her latest record-breaking success with Midnights and the engagement surrounding the Taylor’s Version re-recordings of her older albums, Swift is setting the stage for the cumulative effect of her many eras on their titular tour.