$1 billion Concerts

This is the story of how Taylor Swift might become one of the few artists, maybe even the first one, to rake in more than a billion dollars during a single tour. You might already have listened to her music and so you know who she is, but in the unlikely chance you don’t, here’s a short video from a spectator in one of her concerts from the current tour she is on.

Let’s come back to the $1 billion dollar number. So the tour, named “Eras” started in March of this year. It is a 131-show tour which would end in August 2024, if the schedule stays the way it is. Each of her concerts last more than 3 hours with her singing more than 40 of her songs.

Trung Phuan, in his newsletter, estimated that Swift is selling stadiums with more than 50000 seats at an average price of $200. That means a gross revenue of $10 million. Over 131 concerts, that gives us $1.3 billion, well over the $1 billion number even if the numbers would have been overestimated.

So how is Taylor Swift taking in such huge numbers? Well, she was already a global star, she’s been at the top of the game for the better part of a decade. Moreover, right now she’s the 12th most followed person/celebrity on Instagram with 264 million followers. Her last tour “Reputation”, which was held in 2018 brought in around $300 million in revenue then. Before that the “1989” tour in 2015 grossed around $250 million. There was another tour planned for 2020 but the pandemic caused it to be shelved.

But Taylor did not waste time between 2018 and now. She’s released a lot of songs after the 2018 tour, many of which have been at the top spots in their respective genres. She was also the subject of two Netflix documentaries in 2020, further expanding her audience to places she might not have been as popular before in.

An interesting fact here is that the “Eras” tour initially was to be consisting of 52 concerts, but seeing the demand from the public it was expanded to the 131 number. Her concerts also help to spruce up the local economies by bringing people and hence spending to these cities. So it’s not like she’s only earning for herself.

Taylor Swift is also a very good investor. She owns real estate worth more than $80 million, in addition to 2 private jets reportedly. And she also contributes to a number of charities, the causes ranging everywhere from education to medical.

Like Jeff Bezos once said, his $160 billion dollar net worth was created because he created $840 billion of wealth for other people (this was at the time when Amazon was worth around $1 trillion). Well, it’s not a perfect analogy, but you get the point. Create value for other people and you reap the rewards. Taylor Swift catered to the demand of millions of people, in addition to helping many cities get increased revenues due to consumer spending there. And due to the value she’s providing to so many people, at a modest 30% cut of the $1 billion, she’ll have more than a quarter of a billion dollars for her efforts. This is purely my estimation, the cut could be much higher or lower. She would also have some part of the official merch sales that happen during the tour.

So if you want to increase your income, you need to be able to provide value to society in some form or the other, like producing goods, providing services or recreation. Also, in order to scale something, you either need to sell something small to a lot of people, or something big to a small number of people. And while that’s it for this article, you can read all my articles here. And do let me know if you want a specific topic covered! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.