In the tech industry, when we talk about folks distributing hundreds of millions of dollars, we are usually talking about funding rounds. Using that for context, one can think of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour as so financially successful that she was able to distribute $197M (a healthy C round?) in bonuses to her Eras Tour staff.
Swift can do this because her Eras Tour–which kicked off in March 2023 and wrapped this past Sunday with its final show in Vancouver–grossed over $2 billion (as reported by the New York Times–apologies for the paywall). Billboard (sans paywall) has some more attention-catching stats including number of tickets sold (over 10 million), and the fact that the Eras Tour grossed over $900 million more than the next highest-grossing tour.
As the Eras Tour wraps, Forbes (yes, that Forbes–the business magazine) is tracking reactions. Newsweek is arguing that “the Eras Tour grew the global economy by over $9 billion.” NBC News has a nicely curated recap of the tour’s better known cultural touchpoints, including the initial ticket presale tech fail, the friendship bracelet phenomenon (more on that later), Swift’s relationship with NFL star Travis Kelce, and the list of albums Swift released (or re-released) during the tour.
RedMonk, of course, has talked Taylor Swift before. Last fall I interviewed Dr. Casey Alane Wilson, who is both a Swiftie (a Taylor Swift fan) and professor who studies and teaches Swift’s work. Our conversation covered Swift and technology (including the ticket presale fail and some pretty techie reactions to it), Swift and intellectual property (in case you are wondering why she re-recorded all those albums), and even Swift and medievalism (she has an entire album/Era inspired by Game of Thrones). I’m going to drop the video of the interview right here (in case you want to jump right in):
But before you go fall into a rabbit hole of textual Easter eggs, developer browser tools, and IP drama, a few more data points for your end of the Eras Tour consideration:
- $2 billion is a lot of money.
- Just days before the Eras Tour wrapped, Spotify announced Taylor Swift as its “Global Top Artist of 2024”.
- The term “Taylor Swift of Tech” exists (and in 2024 it apparently applies to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang).
- Swifties have been a highly visible part of the post-election migration from X/Twitter to Bluesky. Furthermore, while tech industry personnel like yours truly are making do with a bsky.social handle (I mean, my first name was available! I have not been this user name fortunate since AIM was a thing), Swifties are leveraging one of the affordances of the AT protocol thanks to a project that streamlines adoption of handles in the swifties.social domain. (Side note: I loved GitHub’s Christina Warren’s Bluesky coverage of her trip to the closing Eras Tour show).
- Remember when I said we’d get back to Eras Tour friendship bracelets? In October of this year the IBM TechXchange show floor leveraged tech-themed friendship bracelets to incentivize traffic among various IBM booths (yes, that IBM). Did it work? Well, my colleague Rachel and I hit as many booths as we could (more on our event takeaways here), and Rachel amassed a pretty impressive haul:
Disclosure: GitHub and IBM are RedMonk clients.
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