The entertainment business had never seen anything like it. No other tour by a rock or pop star has generated so much economic activity in so many different continents or made so much money for the star at the centre of it all. For all of us who have not kept up with Taylor Swift’s remarkable scale or scope of activity, the BBC’s Clare Thorp has rendered yeoman service by writing this detailed piece on the biggest star in modern entertainment. Ms Thorp writes:
“This weekend, after 20 months, 149 shows, a blockbuster concert film and millions of friendship bracelet swaps, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour finally comes to an end in Vancouver, Canada.
Less a live show than a cultural juggernaut steamrolling into 53 cities across five continents, the Eras Tour has dominated headlines, boosted national economies (and craft sales), caused mini-earthquakes and broken countless records – including becoming the highest-grossing tour of all time (experts believe it will top $2bn (£1.6bn) – and that doesn’t include merchandise). Since she kicked off the live shows in March 2023, Swift has released three albums (re-recordings of Speak Now and 1989, and The Tortured Poets Department), snagged her fourth album of the year Grammy – the first artist to do so…
The sheer scale and cultural dominance of the Eras Tour, from the record attendances to the 3.5-hour setlist, is undeniable. In the almost two years it’s been going, it has become its own news cycle – even if you didn’t attend, you’ve probably seen the videos of Prince William or Tom Cruise dancing at the show, or heard about world leaders begging Swift to give their country an economy-boosting visit. We live in an era of blockbuster live shows, but there’s never been anything quite as colossal as this.”
Ms Thorp then helps us understand why Taylor Swift was able to do something that no other star has ever been able to do before.
The first ingredient is intimacy: “…if Swift’s shows were remarkable for their size, they were also striking for their against-the-odds sense of intimacy. Attending the Eras Tour felt less like bowing down to a global megastar, and more like a mass, sequinned meet-up. Earlier this year Variety magazine dubbed her “the world’s greatest community organiser”.”
The second ingredient is relatability: “Being relatable has long been Swift’s calling card. Even as her fame and wealth has soared (she joined the Forbes World’s Billionaires List earlier this year), she’s continued to keep fans believing that she’s not really all that different from them. This starts with her songs: universal experiences – heartache, betrayal, loss, revenge, regret – written about with remarkable specificity. But she’s also carefully cultivated that feeling of inclusivity at her live shows.
From the stage, which extends two-thirds of the way into the stadium so that Swift spends most of the show in the middle of the crowd, to her use of “we” and “us” (“We’re about to go on a little adventure together…”) to the LED wristbands that turn the crowd into part of the show (Coldplay pioneered this at their gigs), the whole thing is designed to feel like a collective experience. Swift first emerges from a puff of pastel parachutes to ecstatic, ear-piercing screams. For a few minutes, up on a raised platform, she seems celestial. Then she smiles, utters “Oh hi!” as if she’s greeting old friends, and the untouchable suddenly becomes attainable.”
The third ingredient is that Ms Swift’s shows run like clockwork: “The show runs like clockwork, but Swift changes just enough to make each night feel unique for the audience. In her short acoustic set she’s never repeated the same combination of surprise songs and deep-cut mash-ups. She has greeted the crowds in languages including Welsh, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. In every city, one of her backing dancers, Kameron Saunders, utters a locally-tailored put down during We Are Never Getting Back Together (in Ireland: “the neck of ye”, London: “up yours…”, Edinburgh: “bolt ya rocket”).”
But the most important ingredient of Ms Swift’s success seems to be that in this world of apps & tablets and streaming & WFH, across the world people are yearning for sensory experiences. Ms Swift understands this dynamic better than any other modern entertainer: “Post-pandemic, live shows have attracted huge demand as people have flocked back to in-person experiences. “That sense of disconnection from each other in Covid and the distrust that went along with that, and the fact that many of us became kind of monks and nuns in ourselves, and were thinking about what we were missing… there’s an intense, metaphysical need to feel together with other people,” says Critchley.
Swift herself recognises this. In the forward to her newly released Eras Tour book, she writes: “We do it because people need an escape from how brutal life can be, and it is the honour of a lifetime to be that for them, if only for a night. And although we are on our own in this big scary life, somehow it doesn’t feel that way when we’re singing the same words as 80,000 other people wearing glittery face paint.””
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