Taylor Swift’s era became the highest-grossing concert in history


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Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour grossed $2.1 billion in sales, making it the highest-grossing concert in history and ending two years of financial and cultural dominance for the pop star.

The figure covers 10 million tickets sold for 149 shows, a person familiar with the matter said. Swift wrapped up the tour with her final show Sunday night in Vancouver, Canada.

The amount of $2.1 billion is double that of any other concert tour in history. It surpassed Elton John’s five-year farewell tour, which grossed $939 million at more than 300 concerts, and Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres album, which sold more than $1 billion at some 170 shows.

The huge sales figure does not include money made by resellers on the secondary market, where seats have fetched thousands of dollars above face value, or for merchandise sold at concerts.

Swift recently released a book of photos from the Eras tour that quickly eclipsed most major releases from professional publishers. The Eras bound book, which is only available through retailers Target, sold 814,000 copies in its first weekend of release — almost as many as Barack Obama’s 2020 memoir.

Swift, whose music is distributed by Universal Music, achieved a level of cultural and musical dominance during the era of the Eras tour similar to the frenzy surrounding The Beatles half a century ago.

When tickets first went on sale in November 2022, overwhelming demand crashed TicketMaster’s site, sparking a public outcry that resulted in a US Department of Justice lawsuit against the ticketing giant. The tour boosted local economies as it first traveled the US and then the rest of the world.

Swift accounted for 1.8 percent of all recorded music sales in the U.S. last year, representing one in every 78 audio streams in the U.S., according to data group Luminate.

The singer, who started writing songs after school as a teenager in Nashville, broke down in tears during a recent show in Toronto as she reflected on the near end of the tour after 18 months.

“My band, my crew, all my fellow performers, we’ve put so much of our lives into this,” she said.



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