The Eras Tour
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“Fortnight”
“The Tortured Poets Department”
“Down Bad”
“So Long, London”
“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”
Mashup: “Teardrops on My Guitar” x “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”
“But Daddy I Love Him”
Note: As Swift’s newest album, Tortured Poets deserves to be the finale. And while, upon first listen, the record may not seem like it has enough stadium-ready bops to close out the show, the above songs 100% have the potential to be converted into the high-energy moments the Eras Tour commands. Just imagine the theatrical potential of “Who’s Afraid,” the meta-ness of a real-life crowd chanting “More!” during “Broken Heart,” and confetti falling from the sky during the final chorus of “But Daddy…” We picture gothic visuals, writing desks, typewriter props, period costumes and lightning strikes during this section.
Now, about that mashup. It’s absurd that Swift has never included any songs from her 2006 self-titled debut album — aka her first-ever era — on the main Eras Tour setlist. But it’s not too late to rectify that.
Picture this: The lights go down after Swift performs “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” Costumes change, a tiger cage and other circus-themed set pieces are wheeled away. Then, the songwriter — her silhouette barely visible under the dim glow of an aquamarine spotlight — sings a cappella the final chorus of the first song about faking smiles in the face of heartbreak she ever released: “Teardrops on My Guitar.” Emphasis on the lyric, “the only one who’s got enough of me to break my heart.”
After she trails off on the last line — “Drew looks at me, I fake a smile so he won’t see” — the stadium comes to life once more as the crowd’s multi-color light-up bracelets go haywire, an explosion of sound filling the space. “I can read your mind,” Swift jumps in, surrounded by dancers as the lights suddenly go up, revealing one last fabulous costume. “‘She’s having the time of her life…’”
Once that’s done, she’ll move on to the finale, flipping off the haters, embracing her truest fans and proudly proclaiming her love for the man of her dreams in one fell swoop with “But Daddy I Love Him,” disappearing offstage before concertgoers have even finished singing along. Fin.
Sabrina Carpenter had a lot to discuss in her new Cosmopolitan digital cover story, from traveling the world with Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour to how she approaches dating (ahem, Barry Keoghan).
While reflecting on opening for the “Anti-Hero” singer on the superstar’s global Eras trek’s Latin America, Australia and Singapore legs, the Girl Meets World alum said she feels “so genuinely lucky.” “I get to perform a set that I’m super comfortable with, and then I get to watch one of the greatest performers every night,” she continued.
“It almost feels like a Broadway show because everything is so synchronized, but at the same time feels so in the moment,” Carpenter added. “That’s an art. It’s really hard to teach. It’s really hard to learn. And I feel so lucky that I get to watch Taylor perform every time. It makes me want to tour the world again, which is a good feeling.”
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The “Feather” singer’s Eras stint followed her own headlining tour for Emails I Can’t Send, Carpenter’s fourth studio album, which debuted at No. 23 on the Billboard 200 in July 2022. Swift’s trek has made for several memorable moments where Carpenter is concerned, from the time the two artists performed “White Horse” and “Coney Island” together to the Work It star’s nightly NSFW “Nonsense” outros.
“the most thank you’s I’ve ever thank you’d to Taylor,” she reflected in a recent Instagram post. “I feel so lucky to witness the magic that is you and this tour. there is truly no one like you and there never will be! i love you with all my heart and i will cherish this taybrina era (and all the eras) till the end of time.”
Another fan-favorite moment from Carpenter’s time with the Eras Tour came earlier this month, when cameras captured the singer-actress running into Barry Keoghan’s arms backstage. Since then, the couple have made their public debut, stepping out together at the 2024 Vanity Fair Oscars party.
Without naming the Saltburn actor directly, Carpenter shared that she prefers to leave her love life up to “fate.” “I know that’s super broad, but I don’t actively look for it,” she told Cosmo. “The relationships that I actually want to put my energy into have to be so interesting or invigorating because they take me away from the other things I love. So yeah, it’s fun and it’s messy. I think I’m still just at this place where I’m really enjoying the newness of all of it.”
See Carpenter on the digital cover of Cosmopolitan below.
Brendan Wixted for Cosmopolitan
Sabrina Carpenter for Cosmopolitan
Brendan Wixted for Cosmopolitan
Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour is still breaking records, five months after its initial release. The blockbuster concert film has already become Disney+’s most-streamed music special of all time, breaking the record just three days after premiering on the platform March 14. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the three-hour-plus project was viewed for a collective 16.2 […]
It’s no secret that Taylor Swift and Beyoncé staged the two biggest tours of 2023, with Swift even continuing the Eras Era throughout 2024. But not only did both artists earn record-breaking grosses and affect local economies with their treks, the stage shows also juiced each artist’s recorded music consumption.
Luminate and Billboard partnered to dig deeper into the connection between touring and streaming, capping a colossal year of headline tours. Beyoncé and Swift proved perfect examples of artists’ abilities to capitalize on their concert calendar to not only score a local bump in each city but sustain long-term national interest throughout the duration of their tours and beyond.
Both Beyoncé and Swift saw expected bumps to their consumption totals upon their respective tour kick-offs. When The Eras Tour launched, Swift’s U.S. on-demand audio streaming count increased by 59% in the week ending March 23, according to Luminate. For Beyoncé, the effects were teased out, as the tour’s first leg in Europe allowed domestic streaming to build slowly before her North American arrival. By the end of their U.S. runs, streams were up – from the week before each tour began through the release of each artist’s concert film – by 106% and 34%, respectively.
Initially, these bumps could be explained by the analysis of touring’s local short-term impact on consumption. In each city that Beyoncé and Swift played, market-level streams immediately grew by 89% and 95%, respectively, on average. But as their tours continued, isolated regional bumps compounded on one another, with particular narratives and trends aggregating to a mountain of consumption at the national level.
The mere announcement (Feb. 1, 2023) of Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour – coupled with the 65th Annual Grammy awards, where she did not perform but accepted two record-breaking trophies – spurred three weeks of gains, as the tour’s on-sale kept excitement alive. The beginning of Beyoncé’s domestic dates naturally fueled consumption in dramatic fashion with six consecutive weeks of increases (July 7 – Aug. 17).
Beyoncé stretched out her summer streaming bump with intention, focusing on individual moments of choreography and arrangements within the setlist. For “Energy,” a deep cut from Renaissance, she made a meal out of the lyric, “Look around, everybody on mute.” She took it literally, pausing the song and freezing alongside her dancers and band, teasing the audience before resuming, “Look around, it’s me and my crew/ Big energy.”
The Mute Challenge soon became an integral part of the show. By the time “Energy” hit its own streaming peak of 1.7 million clicks (week ending Sept. 7), it had nearly tripled its consumption from before the tour.
When Beyoncé performed “My Power,” a non-single from The Lion King: The Gift, she was joined by daughter Blue Ivy Carter on stage. Their much-memed and much-imitated dance routine entered the cannon of iconic Beyoncé choreography, with fans tracking Blue’s progress throughout the tour. The track posted explosive streaming gains over several months, ultimately up 449% by its peak (the week ending Aug. 17) from before the tour’s launch (the week ending May 4).
Spotlights for under-the-radar tracks like “Energy” and “My Power” yielded organic, drawn-out increases in consumption that snowballed alongside a parade of guest stars, controversy over the Queens Remix of “Break My Soul,” and a constant influx of social media content showcasing Beyoncé’s rotating wardrobe from local designers.
Swift’s catalog soared as soon as her tour began on March 17. Even before the July 7 release of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), which warped her streams beyond the impact of The Eras Tour, consumption had almost doubled, at 372.9 million clicks in the week ending June 1. After the new release receded, her catalog maintained, at 391.4 million by the U.S. leg’s end in the week ending Aug. 10.
Like Beyoncé, Swift found songs within her ever-expanding catalog to highlight, particularly those that weren’t already world-conquering hits. Even with a nightly setlist of more than 40 songs, she left room each night to perform two rotating “surprise songs.” On average, the surprise songs got a 27% bump the week of their performance. Removing performances of songs from Speak Now after the release of the Taylor’s Version set, more affected by new-release streaming patterns than the typical tour impact, the average gain bumps to 31%.
After the exposure and subsequent streaming increase, the typical next-week drop was just 5%, indicating that inclusion in the surprise-song section encouraged sustained streaming action.
Within the show’s routine set pieces, Swift turned a fan-favorite into a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit. Lover’s “Cruel Summer,” from 2019, was the first properly performed song each night at The Eras Tour, helping to reignite Swifties’ passion for the album cut. Without an official music video or announcement, even as Swift launched the 2022 Midnights track “Karma” as a single with its Ice Spice remix, “Cruel Summer” showed unstoppable growth from the tour’s launch. Steady between 1.9-2.1 million streams in the early months of 2023, the song ballooned to 16.7 million by the final U.S. show (in the week ending Aug. 10).
The prolonged championing of “Cruel Summer” and the one-after-another success of Swift’s surprise songs underlined The Eras Tour’s ability to transform her from superstar to stratosphere. Her relationships, philanthropy and seemingly every move during the tour continued to fuel her consumption, consistently more than double the streams she drew from earlier that year.
Both Beyoncé and Swift extended their good fortunes with the release of record-breaking concert films, each delivering profits for distributor AMC and more consumption boosts for their catalogs. The seeds they planted with “Energy, “Cruel Summer” and more took full bloom, even inside movie theaters, with audiences singing and dancing along — except when they had to be on mute.
Months after each tour wrapped in the U.S., Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé scored the pop-dance-R&B(-country) chameleon a streaming increase of 54% the week of its Dec. 1 release, while Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour earned its once-country-now-pop star a 20% boost upon its Oct. 13 release.
Beyoncé and Swift are, of course, enormous stars that were likely to attract some amount of attention for going on tour even if they didn’t plan and work for these kinds of long-term rewards. But this kind of long-term, national growth isn’t only reserved for top-of-the-line megastars, as Maluma, ODESZA and Weezer experienced similar touring impact last year.
Both five years removed from their last stadium tours, Beyoncé and Swift designed their shows for maximum impact and staged campaigns that turned each trek into an era of its own.
Click here for more on the symbiotic relationship between touring and streaming.
Don’t let the setlist of back-to-back pop hits, sparkly costumes or confetti cannons fool you — Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour is totally punk rock, as certified by Eddie Vedder in a recent piece.
The Pearl Jam frontman marveled at the magic of the pop star’s global trek, which he attended in July with one of his daughters, in a Mojo piece published Friday (March 15). “The craziest thing was it reminded me of punk rock crowds, of being aligned with all of the misfits in our town, back in the day,” he told the publication. “It was galvanizing and powerful.”
Vedder, who shares daughters Olivia and Harper with Jill Vedder, was spotted with his family at one of Swift’s concerts in Seattle last summer. The rock star’s wrists were filled with friendship bracelets from nearby fans, and he appeared to wear a shirt that said, “It’s me, hi, I’m the father it’s me.”
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“The run-up to it, making friendship bracelets with her and the generosity of these young girls and boys…,” he added. “Trading these bracelets with different messages on them – lyrics, song titles, just acts of good will on these little bracelets. They had found their tribe; they were all agreeing on something.”
The “Society” singer’s comments came just two days shy of the one-year anniversary of the Eras Tour‘s opening night in Glendale, Ariz. on March 17, 2023. Since then, Swift has taken her show all across North America, as well as through parts of Asia and Australia.
The “Anti-Hero” singer closed out a string of performances in Singapore earlier this month. She’ll now take a two-month pause from touring as she prepares to release her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, on April 19.
“Just want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who traveled and put so much effort into being at our shows,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post March 10. “What an unforgettable way to end this leg of the tour!!”
She added, “In the meantime I’ve got an album to release…”
What would you do if Taylor Swift’s performance of “I Can See You” at the Eras Tour was now available to stream on Disney+? An extended cut of the pop star’s blockbuster concert film premiered Thursday night (March 14) on the platform, complete with previously scrapped footage of four acoustic surprise songs performed at SoFi […]
Stephen Colbert is as loyal a Swiftie as they come. On a recent episode of The Late Show, the talk show host told his guest of the night, Paul Rudd, that he would go to life-or-death extremes to make Taylor Swift happy — all because she treated his daughter with kindness more than a decade ago.
Recalling how he took his daughter Madeline — who was 14 at the time — to the Grammys in 2008, Colbert gushed Wednesday night (March 13), “Taylor was so nice to her that, to this day, I would murder for her if she wanted me too.”
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“I’m like, ‘Whatever you want, my queen,’” he added. “‘I will murder for you.’”
The Colbert Report alum previously told the story of how he introduced Madeline to Swift at the Grammys in a 2022 clip from his late-night show. “She turns around and goes, ‘Pretty girl!’ and comes and puts her arms around her and goes, ‘Oh you look amazing!’” he recalled at the time, mimicking how the “Anti-Hero” singer wrapped his daughter in a big hug. “She just praises my daughter for how she looks for, like, 30 seconds.”
“I would jump off a cliff into a pit of spikes for that woman for how nice she was to my daughter,” he’d added. “You’ve got to remember that!”
On Wednesday’s episode, Rudd also opened up about his love for Swift, especially when it comes to her effect on the NFL since dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. “This whole thing is very exciting,” the actor, a longtime Chiefs fan, told Colbert. “I see those stories about the dads and their daughters, and their interests in watching the games together. I get all choked up watching it.”
In May, the Ant Man star attended one of the 14-time Grammy winner’s Eras Tour shows at MetLife Stadium, where he accepted friendship bracelets from fans and bumped into singer-songwriter Claud — who then invited him to star in the Phoebe Bridgers-backed artist’s music video after confessing they had another track coincidentally titled “Paul Rudd.”
“I thought, there’s so much support and love and positivity,” Rudd said of the concert. “To feel that feeling with that many people — it was incredible.”
Watch Colbert and Rudd discuss their Swiftiehood below.
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You can hear it in the silence, you can feel it on the way home, and you can see it in the Disney+ extended cut of Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour film: “You Are in Love,” aka the third of four bonus acoustic tracks confirmed for the movie’s upcoming streaming version. The pop star announced via […]
As promised, Taylor Swift is giving fans sneak peeks at the four surprise songs featured in Disney+’s upcoming extended version of the Eras Tour film every day until the streaming edition drops – and the first track on the list is so scarlet, it’s “Maroon.” In a 25-second clip premiered by Good Morning America Tuesday […]
Taylor Swift will be waking up fans in the best way possible this week. In partnership with Good Morning America, the pop star revealed Monday (March 11) that she plans to give sneak peeks at the exclusive acoustic surprise songs featured in the Disney+ version of her Eras Tour film, one day at a time […]