Taylor Swift, my favourite stadium-filling musician, once reflected in her song “The Man” that she would be given more respect for her artistic achievements were she of the opposite sex. “They’d say I hustled, put in the work/They wouldn’t shake their heads and question how much of this I deserve.”
That said, or sung, she shows little sign of being disheartened. I first came across Swift’s addictive talent after she released her second album Fearless 15 years ago, and listened on constant repeat while driving across US states. It never occurred to me that a 19-year-old country pop singer-songwriter would later conquer the musical world: I, too, underestimated her.
Swift will soon conclude the US leg of her Eras tour with a six-night run in Los Angeles. Hundreds of thousands of her fans have flown into cities, filling hotels and restaurants and spending an average of $1,300: the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia credited her for May being the best month for the city’s hotels since the pandemic.
She is estimated to have grossed $13.6mn per concert, each attended by an average of nearly 54,000 people. Swift is not finished: she will now move to the global leg, ending in London next summer, for which millions of “Swifties” have tried to buy tickets online. Eras could become the first $1bn music tour, surpassing Elton John’s $939mn Farewell Yellow Brick Road shows.
It is a phenomenon, but not an accident. While Swift cannot have known she would achieve all this by the age of 33, she put the conditions in place. “Someday, I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me/and all you’re even gonna be is mean,” she sang in “Mean”. She had been piqued by a nasty reviewer but she was always determined to achieve her business independence.
“Someone has to be in control of an enterprise like this,” Mick Jagger, co-founder and lead singer of the Rolling Stones, answered last year when asked if he is a control freak. It was a fair response, given the behavioural and business chaos that used to characterise music and indeed the Stones themselves. Jagger’s oversight has brought the band enormous rewards.
If someone has to be in control of the Taylor Swift show, why not Swift? That thought came to her while young, and she has made no secret of being determined to liberate herself. “You deserve to own the art you make,” she declared in a heated battle over who owned the masters of her early albums, and she has doggedly re-recorded three of them to make her point.
She also widened her audience, evolving steadily from country to pop and lately working with Aaron Dessner of The National for sad dads like me. It is not a wholly new strategy: Bob Dylan was scorned by folk fans for going electric in 1965. But she has cast it as a necessity for female artists (“They have to or else you’re out of a job”). The Eras tour recalls her reinventions.
Broad reach is vital as the business has shifted to a power law: a steadily greater share of the rewards, from both streaming and performing, has gone to the top musicians. The cost of stadium shows, with multiple set and costume changes, can only be defrayed by selling a lot of tickets to people of various ages and tastes, in many countries.
Swift’s more subtle insight was to realise the value of communicating directly with her fans through social media posts and artful teasing. The “Easter egg” clues about her next moves that she regularly drops for those who follow her closely are the rewards for being devoted. Her superfans come to shows wearing cryptic friendship bracelets strung with long acronyms of her choruses and bridges.
She has thus parlayed her musical genius into becoming one of the world’s biggest direct-to-fan brands. She shares this advantage with BTS, the South Korean band that outsold and outstreamed her for a couple of years before she retook the top spot last year. It makes the difference between having casual supporters and fans who will leap on an aircraft for her.
More tickets are now bought by eager — and often truly fanatical — fans, rather than musical dabblers who want to catch a new band by attending a local show. “Fandom is more and more important for live music,” says Kriss Thakrar of Midia Research. Many concertgoers now say they are willing to dash expensively to another city to see a favourite act.
This effect has been on display in the US as Swift has taken Eras to big city stadiums, drawing fans from hundreds of miles away. Many have spent far more than they budgeted for, carried away in the excitement. It will happen in other countries, too, as she goes: Air New Zealand has added flights to Australia for Swifties to reach her shows there in February.
Swift may be benefiting from a post-pandemic music revival as fans surge to live events. She may also be experiencing the winner-takes-all effect of becoming one of the world’s top acts: no matter how many places you play, demand will be insatiable. But one thing of which she can’t be accused is failing to hustle and put in the work.