LONG LIVE

Taylor Swift Finishes Off Her Eras Tour Era With Record $2 Billion Ticket Sales

The globe-spanning tour took place over 21 months and was something of an economy unto itself.
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Taylor Swift performs on December 06, 2024 in Vancouver, British ColumbiaKevin Winter/TAS24/Getty Images

Taylor Swift's Eras Tour may have concluded on Sunday night in Vancouver, but the 21-month tour has already cemented its place in history. With $2 billion in ticket sales, the Eras Tour is now the most financially successful tour of any and all eras.

Swift closed out the discography-spanning tour with a three-night run in Vancouver, Canada, marking her 149th and final performance of her three-hour-plus setlist in front of a screaming crowd. The New York Times reported and Vanity Fair has confirmed that the singer took in an eye-popping $2,077,618,725 in ticket sales from the run, the first time a dollar amount for the tour has ever been released.

That’s not just breaking the record for the highest ticket sales for a tour, it’s blowing it out of the water. For context, in late August, Billboard reported that Coldplay had nabbed the top spot on the all-time list, racking up $1 billion in ticket sales over two-and-a-half years and 156 dates of their Music of the Spheres World Tour. Swift more than doubled that figure with fewer shows and a shorter timespan. P!nk’s 128 dates over the last year and a half, according to the outlet, commanded nearly $700 million in sales.

Swift has been generous with her earnings, too, doling out some $55 million in bonuses to tour employees when closing out the U.S. leg of the tour, a number that has now risen to $197 million in bonuses for crew overall over the course of the tour, People reported and VF confirmed. She's shared the wealth, literally, with her dancers, truck drivers, physical therapists, and everyone in between as a thank you on top of their salaries.

Of course, it’s no secret that the tour has been successful: Swift is the first billionaire to have earned the financial status solely based on her performances and recordings, and the Eras Tour has been impactful enough to shift demand for flights to Europe during her stint there, and for the Federal Reserve to publish a study based on the tour stops’ impact on local economies. She also contributed $5 million to a local food bank to help with Hurricane Milton and Helene relief, as well as donations to area philanthropies along her tour’s path over the past two years.

Swift’s touring company released other impressive numbers from the tour’s run: 10,168,008 people attended the shows, with an average ticket price of $204. That’s as if all of New York City's residents went to a show, and two million of them brought an out-of-town bestie. That’s like if everyone in Los Angeles attended twice, and half of them decided to go for a third time.

The most-attended show of the tour was February 16, 2024, in Melbourne, Australia, with 96,006 Swifties packing the stadium. Beyond the official ticket sales, Swift also raked in tour proceeds on merchandise sales, and various resellers lined their pockets with markups on the sought-after tickets throughout the tour. Swift also released a new album, The Tortured Poets Department in April, while on tour, the extended Anthology edition of which was released on physical media for the first time on November 30 and has popped the title back to the top of the sales charts. That’s not even to mention the latest additions to her re-recording project, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version), both of which she announced and released while on the tour.

But wait, there’s more! On Black Friday 2024, Swift also dropped the Target-exclusive Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour Book coffee table book, which wasn’t eligible for the New York Times bestseller list based on its exclusive retailer, but reportedly sold nearly a million copies in its first week on shelves, making it the biggest release of the year so far. And, of course, in further multimedia domination, Swift broke yet more records with the theatrical and streaming premieres of the concert film version of the Eras Tour, which she released to home platforms on her most recent birthday, December 13, 2023.

On Sunday, fans celebrated Swift’s upcoming 36th birthday five days early, serenading her during the concert with a rendition of “Happy Birthday.” The singer treated the audience at the final show to her own surprise, super-sizing the acoustic “surprise songs” section from its typical two-ish tracks to two mashups featuring five songs from across her discography—”A Place In This World,” “New Romantics,” “Long Live,” “New Year’s Day,” and “The Manuscript”—and even tweaking a lyric for the occasion. In “Long Live,” instead of the original line “It was the end of a decade,” she sang, “It was the end of an era.”

“The lasting legacy of this tour is that you’ve created such a space of joy and togetherness and love,” Swift said from the stage while introducing the 10-minute version of her song “All Too Well.” “You’re why this is so special, and you supporting me for as long as you have is why I get to take these lovely walks down memory every single night—because you’ve cared about every era of my entire life that I’ve been making music.”

In June, when she confirmed onstage that the tour wouldn’t be extended again after December, Swift said, “this tour has really become my entire life. Like, it’s taken over everything. I think I once had hobbies, but I don’t know what they were anymore.”

Now, perhaps, she can finally rediscover them.