Taylor Swift’s $3.2 Billion Eras Tour Is Just About Over. Why Is Swift So Successful? How Can You Benefit? Harvard Has Answers You might not match Swift, but here’s how to find and make the most of your talent. 

 

Taylor Swift’s $3.2 Billion Eras Tour Is Just About Over. Why Is Swift So Successful? How Can You Benefit? Harvard Has Answers You might not match Swift, but here’s how to find and make the most of your talent.

 

 

 

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is the biggest-selling concert tour in history. Between the first concert in March 2023 and the last one this December, Swift’s proceeds could top $3.2 billion. How did I arrive at that figure? How did Swift achieve such success? What’s one thing she did that can also make you happier? Harvard has answers.

 

 

The biggest portion of this $3.2-billion pie is the money Swift makes from selling tickets to her concerts.

 

By the time she completes the 149 concerts in a couple months, Eras will have filled stadiums that can seat an average of 72,500 people, according to Time, and they paid an average Ticketmaster face value price of about $240, according to Pollstar.

 

 

There are two other sources of money: the nearly $1.4 billion she nets from sales of merchandise—about $159 per fan, of which she takes in 80 percent—and another $78 million from her 30-percent share of the nearly $262 million in global ticket sales for her concert movie.

 

This tour surpasses the previous leader: Elton John’s $940 million farewell tour, with close to 330 performances. Eras, “which has shattered attendance records at numerous major arenas and stadiums, has already surpassed this figure,” Armen Shaomian, associate professor of sport and entertainment management at the University of South Carolina, told me in an October 2024 email.

 

 

Swift began her journey at the age of 14, and her practice has paid off. Her talent—for telling stories, conveying emotions, putting words together in sonorous sequences, and singing—is the foundation of her success. “Her great genius and her innovations and her brilliance as a songwriter is melodic and verbal,” Stephanie Burt, a Harvard professor of English, told the Harvard Gazette.

 

What’s more, many Millennials and members of Gen-Z are fans due to the strong bond they feel with Swift. That bond flows from the emotions underlying her lyrics, a feeling of having grown up with her, an aspiration to follow her model of living their values, and their ties with other Swifties, as Alexandra Gold, a clinical fellow in psychology at Harvard Medical School, explained in the Gazette.

 

 

Like Swift, you can make the most of your talents, which will bring you greater happiness. To guide you toward that, Jamie Beaton, CEO of Crimson Education—a college counseling firm launched in 2013 that’s now worth $554 million—has advice.