Being named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year is all well and good, but Taylor Swift is also raking in plenty of what really counts with her ongoing “Eras Tour.” As expected, she’s become the first performer in history to gross more than a billion dollars, according to a report from the live music trade publication Pollstar.
More precisely, Swift’s Eras Tour has grossed some $1,039,263,762 so far, with the artist scheduled to take the show back on the road in February of next year. Swift sold 4.3 million tickets across 60 shows in eight months, breaking too many individual stadium records to list here in the process.
The Pollstar people seem absolutely gobsmacked by Swift’s success, pointing out that she beat Elton John’s previous touring record with only a fifth of individual shows than John had. She also did it without topping the chart on ticket prices, coming in fifth on that front for the year. Put simply, she topped every other comparable touring act in just eight months of shows, and that doesn’t even include all the merchandise she’s sold to her increasingly rabid fanbase.
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There’s data on Eras Tour merch too, of course, with Swift taking in an estimated $200 million in merchandise revenue. One of the ways this was accomplished was by setting up trailers selling merchandise outside her stadium location in between dates, allowing fans to buy t-shirts, hats, and other pieces of Swiftia even when she wasn’t performing that night. The tour gross also doesn’t include the almost equally overwhelming success of the “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” movie, with its worldwide gross approaching $250 million, already enough to make it the most successful concert film ever made in terms of box office gross.
Performing live has always been a big part of Swift’s music career, but none of her other blockbuster tours came close to the billion-dollar club — which, to be fair, no other artist has ever managed to do either.
If next year proves as successful for Swift’s Eras Tour, that plus a handful of other dates that fell outside the Pollstar year will gross somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.1 billion when it’s all said and done, a record that will likely stand for quite a while.