Eras Tour
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A Taylor Swift fan who filed a class action against Ticketmaster parent Live Nation in the wake of last year’s disastrous presale of tickets to the Eras Tour has agreed to drop her case against the concert giant, months after attorneys on the case said they were engaged in settlement talks.
Swift fan Michelle Sterioff filed her case in December 2022 just weeks after the botched Eras rollout, which saw widespread service delays and website crashes as millions of fans tried – and many failed – to buy tickets. At the time, her lawyers blasted Live Nation as a “monopoly” that had “knowingly misled millions of fans.”
But a year later, Sterioff voluntarily asked a federal judge on Tuesday to dismiss her case. It’s unclear if a settlement was reached, but the two sides reported in August that they were engaged in “ongoing settlement discussions.” Neither side immediately returned requests for comment.
Sterioff’s proposed class action was just one piece of the legal fallout for Live Nation following the error-plagued pre-sale for Eras, which went on the earn hundreds of millions of dollars and dominate headlines as 2023’s biggest concert tour.
After the Nov. 22, 2022 incident, Live Nation quickly apologized to fans and pinned the blame on a “staggering number of bot attacks” and “unprecedented traffic.” But lawmakers in Washington and state attorneys general around the country quickly called for investigations. That included Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the chair of the Senate subcommittee for antitrust issues, who suggest that regulators consider “breaking up the company” – a reference to Live Nation’s 2010 merger with Ticketmaster.
Days after the incident, the New York Times reported that DOJ had already been investigating Live Nation for months over potential antitrust violations, reaching out to venues across the country to ask about the company’s conduct. Last month, Reuters reported that the probe was ongoing, with federal investigators focusing on whether Live Nation imposed anticompetitive agreements on venues. A Senate subcommittee investigation is also underway, sending out subpoenas last month demanding info about the company’s “failure to combat artificially inflated demand fueled by bots in multiple, high-profile incidents.”
Taylor Swift performs onstage for night three of Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour at Nissan Stadium on May 07, 2023 in Nashville.
John Shearer/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
Sterioff’s case was one of two major class actions filed against Live Nation over the Eras ticket rollout. In her complaint, she accused the company of violating consumer protection and antitrust laws, calling Ticketmaster a “monopoly that is only interested in taking every dollar it can from a captive public.”
“Because Ticketmaster has exclusive agreements with virtually all venues capable of accommodating large concerts, Taylor Swift and other popular musicians have no choice but to sell their tickets through Ticketmaster, and their fans have no choice but to purchase tickets through Ticketmaster’s primary ticketing platform,” her lawyers wrote.
Sterioff’s lawsuit claimed that Live Nation has exploited that dominance to charge “ever more supracompetitive ticketing fees for both primary and secondary ticketing services,” including for “virtually all venues hosting ‘The Eras’ Tour.”
But the lawsuit has largely been paused for months. In August, both sides agreed that it would be better to wait to litigate the case after a federal appeals court rules on a separate antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, which will decide whether the company can force ticketbuyers to resolve such legal claims in private arbitration rather than open court.
The other class action over the Eras debacle, filed by an outspoken fan named Julie Barfuss and more than two dozen other spurned Swifities, remains pending in California federal court. In her complaint, Barfuss went even further than Sterioff, claiming Live Nation had tacitly allowed the kind of mass-scalping that caused so many problems during the pre-sale.
“Ticketmaster has stated that it has taken steps to address this issue, but in reality, has taken steps to make additional profit from the scalped tickets,” Barfuss’ lawyer wrote. “Instead of competition, Ticketmaster has conspired with stadiums to force fans to buy more expensive tickets that Ticketmaster gets additional fees from every time the tickets are resold.”
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Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour is poised to become the highest-grossing global tour of all time, according to Billboard’s estimates.
While no official numbers have been reported yet, Swift’s tour should pass current record-holder Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour with more than $900 million in ticket sales so far.
On Sunday (Nov. 26), Swift played her last scheduled show of the year, wrapping an intense run of 66 concerts in the United States, Mexico and South America. Representatives for The Eras Tour have not yet reported official revenue or attendance figures to Billboard Boxscore or any other trade journal or news entity, but the enormity of The Eras Tour is impossible to ignore, with a total that amounts to a staggering average of nearly $14 million per show.
Dating back almost 40 years, all Boxscore rankings are based on figures reported to Billboard. Data is reported from a variety of official industry sources, from artist managers and agents to promoters and venue executives. Reporting has always been voluntary, and some artists, venues and promoters opt to withhold data from representation on our charts. It is not uncommon for artists to not report — or to wait until the end of a tour, which is still more than a year away in Swift’s case — though it’s rare that such a well-documented blockbuster tour, in contention for top year-end honors, is not submitted. Swift’s abstention disqualifies her from appearing on year-end Boxscore charts.
Swift kicked off The Eras Tour in Glendale, Ariz., on March 17, playing 53 domestic shows before wrapping at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., outside Los Angeles, on Aug. 9. She hit a total of 20 U.S. cities, and 11 of those venues have provided attendance figures to Billboard. Based on those numbers, as well as estimates based on aggressive scaling at the other nine stadiums, Swift likely sold 3.3 million tickets over 53 shows in the United States, or an average of 63,000 tickets per show.
Sources close to the tour point to an average domestic ticket price of around $252. This is in line with the prices for the summer’s other major concert event, Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, which maintained a $135 ticket in Europe and a $253 ticket in North America. While ticket prices might dip in certain markets and bloom in others, using that number as an average puts the U.S. leg of The Eras Tour at $838.3 million. That total gross spreads out to $15.8 million per show, a staggering figure that exceeds recent tours by Bad Bunny, Beyoncé, and The Rolling Stones, each of which had giant totals of their own.
Taylor Swift performs onstage during Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour at Levi’s Stadium on July 28, 2023, in Santa Clara, Calif.
Jeff Kravitz/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
That projected $838 million haul is more than enough to make Eras the highest-grossing U.S. and North American tour ever. John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour holds the official Boxscore title, with $567.7 million in the United States and Canada. That total reflects 135 shows over a span of four years, compared to Swift’s 53 shows in less than six months.
Moreover, The Eras Tour’s U.S. gross would situate it as the second-highest grossing tour of all time based on global figures, before even crossing the border. John’s farewell tour remains the official record-holder with $939.1 million.
Since wrapping the Eras Tour’s U.S. leg, Swift played four shows at Mexico City’s Foro Sol (Aug. 24-27) and, more recently, nine South American shows, spread between Buenos Aires in Argentina and Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Those dates bring her much closer to John’s global record, even based on relatively conservative projections. But as we’ve seen with virtually every worldwide stadium tour in the last two years, the post-pandemic surge in ticket prices hasn’t been as severe outside the United States.
Further, these are Swift’s first shows in these Latin American markets. That means pent-up demand likely drove huge sales, though her base isn’t quite as explosive there as it is in the States.
Based on estimates considering the high end of grosses and ticket prices for each Latin American venue’s post-pandemic history, The Eras Tour likely earned another $60 million to $75 million and more than 750,000 tickets from those 13 shows.
In all, Billboard estimates that Swift has generated $906.1 million and sold 4.1 million tickets in 2023 across all shows in the United States, Mexico and South America. That would unofficially make The Eras Tour the biggest tour of 2023. And when considering Swift’s total revenue from the tour, it doesn’t even account for merchandise sales, sponsorships, music streaming and sales boosts, or her self-produced and released Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film.
Swift is scheduled to resume The Eras Tour on Feb. 7 with four shows at the Tokyo Dome in Japan. Then, she’ll play seven shows in Australia and six in Singapore. In May, she kicks off a 50-date run in Europe before returning to North America for 18 shows in new markets, including the tour’s first entry into Canada. In all, that’s 85 shows to go, with the possibility of more to come, considering her recent concert additions to runs in London and Vancouver.
These upcoming international legs are already more ambitious than any previous Swift tour. While this year’s 53 U.S. shows are in line with what she did on 2018’s Reputation Stadium Tour and 2015’s The 1989 World Tour, those treks included just six and seven shows in Europe, respectively — a fraction of next year’s slate of 50.
If we use the comparison between Beyoncé’s recent European and North American grosses as a north star, in Europe, Swift could be looking at $8.5 million per show, or about $420 million over the entire leg. And even if next year’s North American shows dip from 2023’s record-breakers, the U.S. and Canada shows could add another $240 million to 260 million. Including the 17 shows in Asia and Australia, The Eras Tour is likely headed toward a total gross of $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion by the end of 2024. It will be the first in history to earn more than $1 billion in ticket sales and will set Swift far apart from her competitors. If figures skew toward the higher end of what’s possible, she could double John’s current record gross.
Representatives for Swift did not respond to a request for comment on Billboard‘s estimates at press time.
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A small percentage of Taylor Swift fans made huge profits reselling their Eras Tour tickets on sites like StubHub as professional scalpers mostly had to watch from the sidelines, according to data reviewed by Billboard.
The unusual dynamic underscores the challenges major tours face in combating scalpers — and the unintended consequences of efforts to keep tickets off the secondary market.
Swift’s touring team sought to keep tickets for the Eras Tour off the secondary market, according to Ticketmaster officials, and met with Ticketmaster executives to discuss how to best prevent mass ticket scalping. One option was that Ticketmaster could use its Safetix service to digitally lock tickets in place and prevent fans from transferring their tickets, effectively blocking all ticket buyers from reselling their tickets on sites like StubHub. But the downside was that, while many fans liked the idea of blocking scalpers, they didn’t like having their own tickets made non-transferable and found such restrictions inconvenient.
Ultimately, the tour decided to use Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan platform to screen out scalpers from the initial ticket sale, asking buyers to register in advance. Fans identified as legitimate fans were sent a code allowing them to buy tickets during the presale, which opened on Nov. 15, 2022, and subsequently crashed as millions of fans, scalpers and bots flooded the site.
Ticketmaster officials would later say the website meltdown was the result of a massive denial of service attack that disrupted the presale but didn’t defeat the security measures put in place to screen out scalpers from fans. As proof of its success, Ticketmaster announced that less than 5% of the approximately 5 million tickets sold for the tour ended up being listed on secondary markets.
It’s an impressive feat compared with other major tours in 2023 that took fewer steps to keep tickets off the secondary market and on average saw 20–30% of available tickets sold through StubHub.
While secondary tickets for tours like Beyonce’s and Coldplay’s were initially listed at major markups several times the face value, as more tickets moved through the secondary market prices dropped over time.
Swift’s Eras Tour saw the opposite effect. Eras tickets on StubHub were marked up 10 times face value, and then never dropped. The huge spike in price allowed resale sites, which collect a percentage of sales from both sellers and buyers, to make up the revenue it would have generated had they sold a higher volume of tickets, according to a StubHub rep.
Selling the tickets was easy, but getting them into the hands of fans proved difficult. StubHub noticed that orders for Eras tickets were experiencing an unusually high volume of delays and complaints from buyers. When company officials investigated the issue, they discovered that 83% of the Eras Tour tickets sold on its site were coming from new accounts with no record of past sales. The vast majority of those tickets are believed to have come from Swift fans, and they were making big bucks. A ticket with a face value under $150 could fetch $1,700, while tickets close to the stage were going for as high as $10,000.
While the outcome of the story is surprising, the fact that 83% of the available inventory of Eras Tour tickets on StubHub was sold by fans and not ticket brokers is a testament to how efficiently Swift and Ticketmaster were screening out professional scalpers, reducing their access to inventory to less than 1% of available tickets. While Swift would probably prefer that none of her tickets be flipped on the secondary market, at least she can take solace knowing that her fans, not professional scalpers, reaped most of the financial rewards.
Sabrina Carpenter is in the midst of opening for Taylor Swift on the Latin American leg of the popular Eras tour, and the “Nonsense” singer reflected on the pinch-me moment she found out about the gig in a new interview with Who What Wear. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts […]
Sabrina Carpenter is in the midst of opening for Taylor Swift on the Latin American leg of the popular Eras tour, and the “Nonsense” singer reflected on the pinch-me moment she found out about the gig in a new interview with Who What Wear. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts […]
Taylor Swift absolutely blew up the internet after her Saturday (Nov. 11) Buenos Aires, Argentina, Eras Tour show by changing her “Karma” lyrics to shout out her football star boyfriend, Travis Kelce, and now, Mr. Karma himself is opening up about the viral moment.
“Yeah no I had no clue [she would do that] … well, I might have had a little bit of a clue, but definitely when I heard it come out of her mouth, it still shocked me,” Kelce admitted on the latest episode of his New Heights podcast, which he co-hosts with brother Jason Kelce. “I was like, ‘Oh s–t, she really just said that.’”
Swift had altered the lyrics slightly to sing, “Karma is the guy on the Chiefs coming straight home to me.” (The original line goes, “Karma is the guy on the screen coming straight home to me.)
The tight end was so surprised by the pop star’s gesture, in fact, that he completely missed that Swift’s father, Scott, who sported a Chiefs lanyard that night, was trying to give him a high-five. “Mr. Swift, I apologize, big guy. Oh man, I missed that,” he said, adding that he “persuaded” the patriarch, a longtime Eagles fan, to join Chiefs Nation after meeting him at dinner the night prior.
“I was enjoying myself down there in Buenos Aires,” Travis continued. “The show was even more electric knowing that I had a little bit more to enjoy it for and yeah. Taylor absolutely ripped it. She killed it. And it looked like she was having some fun up there.”
The Ohio native went on to give insider details about Swift’s decision to postpone her Friday (Nov. 10) show, which he had originally planned to attend, due to severe weather risks. “The entire stage is an LED screen, so, lightning and electronics don’t mesh very well,” he explained to his older brother, how is the Eagles’ center.
“She wasn’t too happy,” he continued. “She kind of prides herself on performing through weather or rain. But when it’s unsafe to her and her crew and everybody in the stadium, you gotta do what you gotta do.”
Kelce ended up attending Swift’s Saturday show, while her Friday show was rescheduled to Sunday. “I think it ended up being perfect,” the athlete said. “I was blown away. It was an electric crowd, too. And for everybody that went to those shows, Taylor was on record saying it was one of her favorite places to play. So hats off to you guys for showing the love.”
The day she announced her postponement, Swift picked up six Grammy nominations, including nods for album, song and record of the year. She’s also the lead finalist for the 2023 Billboard Music Awards, with nods in 20 categories. (Stream the BBMAs Sunday, Nov. 19, at BBMAs.watch, or via Billboard and the BBMAs’ social channels.)
Watch Travis Kelce talk about his time in Argentina on New Heights above.