Summary.
On December 8, in Vancouver, Canada, Taylor Swift will wrap up her record-breaking Eras Tour. The numbers tell part of the story: Swift’s tour has spanned more than 150 shows across five continents, has likely grossed more than $2 billion, and generated more than $10 billion impact on local economies. It has surpassed Elton John’s 330-show Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour to become the highest-grossing tour in history.
But reducing Swift’s achievements to statistics alone misses the bigger picture. With the Eras Tour, she has redefined the trajectory of a pop star, achieving a level of cultural ubiquity rare for artists two decades into their careers.
For the past two years, I’ve been working on a book called There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift, which examines how she has scaled her popularity — multiple times — in an industry that tends to cycle though stars like fashion trends. The more I tried to find business-focused explanations for Swift’s seemingly uncanny ability to continually play to win, the more my interest in her career grew.
Among my takeaways: Swift has long been a superstar thanks to her ability to personally connect through her songwriting and the close, sometimes-parasocial relationships she has fostered with fans. It’s her own very specific take on being “customer obsessed.” But it’s her mastery of the streaming era — adapting her approach to meet the relentless demand for fresh content and fan engagement — that has elevated her popularity to unprecedented heights.
Now, Swift isn’t just a superstar — she’s a megastar.
Leveraging Platforms for Constant Engagement
Between her 2020 album Folklore, which was a surprise drop during the pandemic, and the 2022 Eras Tour announcement, Swift released two additional studio albums — Evermore and Midnights — while simultaneously re-recording and releasing parts of her earlier catalog.
This fast pace was un-Swift-like as she had previously typically released a new studio album every two years. But, as Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek noted in a 2020 interview, streaming favors rapid and constant consumption of new music, from which an album may become the culminating moment. “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans,” he said. “It is about putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album, and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans.”
Swift had been mastering many of these elements — fan engagement, storytelling, relentless effort — for years. What she was missing was what Ek described as that “continuous dialogue” with her fans in the form of a steady flow of new music.
Since the Eras tour began, Swift has released two more re-recorded albums and an entirely new studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, with an additional expanded edition featuring 31 songs.
The flood of content in recent years didn’t just energize her longtime fans; it brought in new listeners who were drawn to her evolving sound and the compelling narrative behind the re-recordings. Naturally, her public profile, romantic relationships, and starry circle of friends contribute in parallel. But the strategy still lives and dies with her music.
The Rise of Mega-Concerts
Demand for the Eras Tour was turbocharged by what The Wall Street Journal’s Neil Shah has dubbed “the rise of mega-concerts.”
While many artists and labels are finding it more difficult to catch, let alone sustain, people’s attention, a select number of artists, such as Zach Bryan and Blackpink, have been able to use Tik Tok and streaming to build passionate followings and perform in venues that would have once been out of reach.
The growth in the concert market, fueled in part by the yearning of Millennials and extremely online members of Gen Z for more IRL experiences, has also pushed superstars with long-established fanbases to supersize their own shows. Some recent examples: Adele played to 73,000 fans in Munich on an outdoor stage that was custom built for the one-off event. Madonna played a free show to an estimated crowd of 1.6 million fans in Rio de Janeiro. Coldplay’s 10-night run in Buenos Aires in 2022 and the band’s upcoming 10-show run at Wembley Stadium in London is further proof of the massive scale of modern touring for veteran superstars.
When tickets for the Eras Tour went on sale, demand overwhelmed Ticketmaster’s system, with 14 million users and bots generating 3.5 billion system requests. Dubbed “The Great War” by fans, the debacle revealed the scale of Swift’s reach: According to Ticketmaster, meeting demand would have required 900 stadium shows — nearly 20 times the planned schedule for the U.S. tour.
The Eras Tour experience then needed to meet or exceed these high expectations. And Swift, who used to invite her superfans to her home for listening sessions, delivered. Her initial setlist ambitiously spanned nine eras, clocking in at close to 192 minutes. Though, say, 30 songs would have been more than sufficient — she played 24 during her Reputation tour — Swift gave fans 44.
When the Eras Tour went to Europe in the spring of 2024, it included an entirely new section devoted to Tortured Poets. In the middle of an already hot-selling tour, Swift and her team were nimble enough to stand a massive stage production on its head — and committed enough to her fandom/customers to make it happen.
In a world that increasingly demands more from artists — more content, more engagement, more tour dates, more everything — Swift gave her fans an elevated, energetic, personal performance that exceeded what they could have anticipated or perhaps even felt they deserved.
Swift’s excessiveness is partly what fans love about her. Her drive to exceed expectations is part of her lore. Her fans understand this mindset, this seemingly incontrovertible need to always do more, do better, top the last one, and delight them in the process.
The TikTok-ization of the Concert Experience
Since the start of the Eras Tour, Swifties flooded TikTok with more than 1.9 million videos that averaged an astounding 380 million views per day, with no single day dropping below 200 million.
The tour’s visual and thematic elements made for good digital storytelling. Rather than play a conventional greatest hits show, she unabashedly returned to her past, creating a mini set for each of her career’s eras, embracing the vibes and aesthetics of each.
Users at home flocked to TikTok to watch fan-shot livestreams and other videos in which Swifties shared their own outfit recreations and concert highlights. They also meticulously analyzed Swift’s wardrobe changes, microphone colors, and guitar choices for hidden meanings and symbolic connections. Even small moments, a piano malfunction or an unplanned laugh, were dissected and shared, building anticipation for what she might do next.
This feedback loop — where Swift provided the raw material and fans amplified and personalized it — was the culmination of years of crafting a relationship with her audience that feels deeply personal and inclusive.
In October 2023, she pivoted again, releasing her self-made Eras Tour concert film to movie theaters, and later to streaming on Disney+. Fans who hadn’t been able to visit a stadium suddenly got their own experience, and previous concertgoers could relive the magic. It now stands as the highest-grossing concert film of all time, raking in more than $260 million worldwide at the box office.
And for all those fans watching quick clips or jittery live streams on TikTok? Each night Swift has an acoustic set that includes two or three “surprise” songs. These might be mashups of two of her hits from different eras, and they occasionally include a surprise guest star. Fans track which songs she has performed in this section, eagerly waiting to hear what she might do next time. Suddenly, there was a reason to keep watching those clips for every single show, further scaling its reach and impact, all wrapped in devotion to her fans.
The Eras Tour became both a career retrospective and an invitation for her audience to celebrate their own journeys alongside hers. Fans flocked to online spaces, where they didn’t just consume the tour; they curated it and reinterpreted it, ensuring that its ripple effects extended far beyond the stadiums.
In essence, the Eras Tour wasn’t just a concert series — it was a participatory phenomenon.
. . .
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is a case study in how a legacy act can navigate the modern attention economy. While fans are bombarded with endless streams of content and options for entertainment, many artists — even superstars — struggle to maintain relevance, let alone grow their influence. Swift has managed to achieve both.
Can other legacy acts replicate this model? Probably not to the same level. While other artists can — and should — learn from Swift’s approach, she has an unrivaled ability to quickly switch up her strategies while encouraging her hyper-passionate fans to become active participants in her creative process.