Another day, another story of Taylor Swift’s total dominance over the entire musical landscape. Swift, TIME‘s Person Of The Year, was already the artist with the most Spotify streams in 2023. But Swift is reportedly only making $100 million on those Spotify streams. Peanuts! Pocket change! Meanwhile, her Eras Tour has now broken all live-music records, and it’s now the first tour ever to earn a billion dollars in ticket sales.
Pollstar reports that the Eras Tour grossed $1,039,263,762 this year. The tour is still ongoing, and that number only covers eight months of touring — 60 shows, starting in with Arizona’s opening date and ending with her last show in Buenos Aires last month. It doesn’t include sales for the shows that Swift hasn’t played yet, and it also doesn’t include the Eras Tour movie, which has earned about $250 million at the global box office. Pollstar also estimates that Eras Tour merch brought in another $200 million. Pollstar‘s Andy Gensler writes, “In that time, she sold a mind-boggling 4.3 million tickets at an average ticket price of $238.95, putting her average show gross at a massive $17,321,063 for this leg of the tour.”
Previously, the highest-grossing tour in history was Elton John’s long farewell trek, which pulled in $939 million. But Elton John did that with 328 shows over a pandemic-interrupted five-year stretch. This was a hugely lucrative year for live music, and Beyoncé, Taylor’s closest peer, brought in about $580 million — also an astonishing number, but nowhere near what Swift has done. The other names on the year-end top-10 list are Bruce Springsteen, Coldplay, Harry Styles, Morgan Wallen, Ed Sheeran, Pink, the Weeknd, and Drake. Drake is at the very bottom of that list, but his tour still brought in $185 million. These people are all doing great for themselves.
Still, nobody is doing Scrooge McDuck numbers like Taylor Swift. With the Eras Tour extending through next year, Pollstar projects that it’ll bring in another $1.125 billion next year. That means that the full two-year Eras Tour “has the possibility of setting an even more astronomical record, that is hard to even fathom: a $2.165 billion gross — which is more than the GDP of 17 small nations.”
In related news, capitalism is wild.
