“It’s been a long time coming…”
Taylor Swift opens the Eras Tour with her backup dancers pulling sweeping, beautiful sunset-colored feathers from her as she sings, “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince.” The entire stadium explodes with screams and cheers. Everyone in the audience feels the excitement and joy of the people surrounding them, and the whole world seems to stop, as Swift shouts, “Welcome to the Eras Tour!”
Taylor Swift is a phenomenon. Even if you don’t like her music or Swift as a whole, it’s hard to deny the respect she deserves for her impactful songwriting and all her accomplishments. Her tour, the Eras, became the first tour ever to gross over $2 billion, she’s the only person to win Album of the Year four times at the Grammys (she’s seeking her fifth win this year) and she was named Spotify’s most streamed artist in 2024 for the second year in a row.
December 8 marks the last show of the Eras Tour. By the end of 2022, Swift released four albums that she did not get the chance to tour due to COVID-19, so she decided that this tour would cover her eleven “eras” and each album. The mega three-and-a-half-hour show includes forty-four songs and two “surprise songs,” which Swift changes each night, before performing her final era of the night, “Midnights.”As her tour progressed, Swift began combining surprise songs, creating artistic mashups with her music. For example, she played a mix of “Maroon” from “Midnights” and “Cowboy Like Me” from “Evermore” for her second night of her Indianapolis show.
Swift began her legendary tour on March 17, 2023. In the past year and (almost) nine months, Swift played at 152 sold-out stadiums in 51 cities on five continents, performing over five hundred hours of music for over ten million fans.
(Source: Tallulah Echtenkamp)
The Eras Tour is the biggest tour in music history, reaching over $2 billion in revenue, and impacting the economy of every city it was played in. To put the economic impact of the Eras Tour in perspective: every $100 spent on the concert yielded $300 generated throughout the hosting city or town on commodities like hotels and food. In comparison, fans attending the Eras Tour spend an average of $1,300 to $1,500 on outfits, merchandise and travel. The smallest venue that Swift played in the Eras Tour held 43,000 people, boosting local economies by millions of dollars in a few short days.
Economics aside, Swift created a community for her fans. With just one song lyric, “So make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it,” Swift inspired fans to start making and trading hundreds of friendship bracelets. Friends, strangers, security guards and anyone willing would shed the bracelets on their wrists, exchanging them with their fellow fans.
When asked about why she loves Swift, Ella Klebaner (Form IV), who experienced the Eras tour says, “Some of her music is really nostalgic so seeing the Eras tour and experiencing my old favorite songs was really special.”
Marin Hertzan (Form IV) appreciated the Eras tour, sharing that “it was so special because it was a way for multiple generations of her fans to enjoy all their favorite songs from throughout her whole career.”
(Source: Tallulah Echtenkamp)
Traditions fill the concert, from fans screaming “You forgive, you forget, but you never let it (pause) go!” during “Bad Blood” and when the audience claps twice in “You Belong With Me.” Every aspect that the fans creatively came up with throughout the tour makes the experience more memorable and impactful for the audience and the people around Swift.
Although these pockets of joy every weekend of the concert ended, the community that Taylor Swift created with her music will not.
Mia Seshadri (Form IV) shares her perspective, “How do I feel about the Eras tour ending? It’s a bittersweet moment, it’s sad because this giant event that has brought together such a strong community is over now, after almost two years, where so much time has passed and so much has happened in the world, so to see that conclude is pretty sad but it is also something to celebrate. This tour has had such a lasting impact on the music industry and the places that she’s visited and it has pushed Taylor Swift up to legend status, like she is a legend.”
