When tensions flare in the contested South China Sea, age-old territorial feuds or military drills are typically to blame—not American popstars known for their blond tresses and affinity for cats.
Yet Taylor Swift found herself at the center of a heated regional spat in February, when Singapore was accused of secretly paying Swift’s team up to $18 million to ensure the island was the sole stop in the Southeast Asia leg of her record-breaking Eras Tour. Singapore’s confirmation of having made a payment of an undisclosed amount intensified the backlash, with one peeved Filipino lawmaker accusing the island of operating by “the law of the jungle.”
Singapore wasn’t too worried. Hosting the extravaganza may have caused some bad blood, but it is estimated to have injected between $260 million and $375 million into the country’s economy, as more than 300,000 fans descended on the island for the tour. And that’s just a fraction of the more than 10 million people worldwide who turned out in force to shake it off with Swift during her marathon tour (including, admittedly, this Foreign Policy reporter).
Those are just some of the staggering figures that have emerged from Swift’s Eras Tour, which wrapped in December after a nearly two-year run. Before Eras, for example, no tour had passed the billion-dollar mark in ticket sales; Swift shattered that record, raking in $2.2 billion in gross earnings.
Three people, one holding a phone on a selfie stick, pose for a photo in front of a tower of TVs with Taylor Swift’s face on them.
Taylor Swift fans take pictures next to an Eras Tour installation at the Marina Bay Sands complex in Singapore on Feb. 28. Roslan Rahman/AFP via Getty Images
Yet that number doesn’t even begin to account for all of the revenue generated beyond concert ticket sales. In September 2023, the U.S. Travel Association estimated the tour’s total economic impact at the time had surpassed some $10 billion—and that was just five months in.
“If she were her own economy, she would be bigger than 50 or so of the poorest nations in the world,” said Adam Gustafson, a professor of music at Penn State Harrisburg, who likened Swift’s influence to a “massive gravitational pull.”
Swift may have humble origins in West Reading, Pennsylvania, but the Eras Tour has laid bare just how powerful her gravitational pull has become.
She has drawn in powerful world leaders, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who attended her show in Toronto, and Chilean President Gabriel Boric, a known Swiftie who once leapt to her defense on Twitter, tenderly sending “hugs from the south.” Her tour has captured the attention of the Bank of England and the U.S. Federal Reserve. And the force of her fandom has, quite literally, shaken the world, with the dancing at her concerts in Edinburgh and Seattle generating enough of a seismic shock that scientists took notice.
“I don’t think we’ll ever see anything like it again, and I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it before,” said Ryan Herzog, an economics professor at Gonzaga University who partnered with New York Times columnist and economics professor Paul Krugman to develop a class on “Swiftonomics.”
Taylor Swift sings into a microphone and flips her hair over her shoulder while on stage in a giant stadium that is packed with fans.
Swift performs in Melbourne, Australia, on Feb. 16. This concert drew the biggest crowd on the Eras Tour. Graham Denholm/TAS24/Getty Images
You don’t have to be a devout Swiftie to have felt the economic reverberations of the popstar’s marathon tour, which extended into the far reaches of the global economy over its nearly two-year run.
The numbers alone are eye-popping: $2.07 billion in ticket sales, 10,168,008 attendees, 149 shows, 51 cities, 21 countries, five continents.
Beyond the gold rush in ticket sales, the Eras Tour pumped up hotel revenue; drove up demand for flights—prompting Southwest Airlines to add new flights to “help Swifties get to and from her concerts,” per a company statement; and spiked retail and restaurant spending. The bead market also boomed: Michaels, a retailer known for its arts and crafts supplies, reported that its sales for bracelet materials surged, popularized by the beaded friendship bracelets that have become a trademark of the Eras Tour.
“The magnitude of her impact was large everywhere she went,” said Herzog.
The last time that Swift toured was in 2018, after she released Reputation, a defiant album defined by its slithering snakes and angsty feuds. (Remember “Look What You Made Me Do”?) Reputation spanned 53 shows and 7 countries, but even that feels small compared with the colossal Eras Tour.
In an evolving music industry now dominated by streaming giants, such as Spotify or Apple Music—which give artists only a sliver of profits—experts said touring can be a key source of income for many musicians.
“Artists really don’t get a lot of money from streaming; that is why they’re putting on these big shows,” said Kara Reynolds, an economist at American University who teaches a class on Swiftonomics. “All the money now in the music industry is really in touring.”
But for almost five years, Swift took a break from touring. Rather than hitting the road, particularly when much of the world shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, Swift churned out four new albums: Lover (2019), folklore (2020), evermore (2020), and Midnights (2022). Her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department (2024), was released during the Eras Tour.
An artist’s depiction of Taylor Swift is painted on a flight of steps behind a crowd of fans.
Fans pose for pictures with the Spanish Steps outside Wembley Stadium, west of London, on June 21. The steps were renamed as the “Swiftie Steps” after being painted by a street artist prior to an Eras Tour concert.Benjamin Cremel/AFP via Getty Images
Some of the Taylormania can be traced back to the isolation of the pandemic and pent up demand for Swift’s new music. “The timing after COVID just was impeccable,” said Herzog, who said that there was a “perfect recipe” of factors. “The fact that she hadn’t toured enabled her to put on a show unlike anything anyone had experienced.”
Yet all recipes, no matter how perfect, need capable hands. With some two decades of experience under Swift’s belt, economists and seasoned watchers described her as a savvy businesswoman and marketing whiz, one who has leveraged social media to her advantage and strategically made bold, even unusual, professional decisions to directly connect with fans and establish her empire.
Dani Winchester, co-host of the Swift-focused Taylearning podcast, likened Swift to a “two-headed dragon.” “One head is her immense talent, her unparalleled pen, and just what an incredible musician and artist she is,” she said. “The other head is this absolutely insane businesswoman.”
Take, for example, Swift’s decision to rerecord her older albums, allowing her to rerelease her music under her ownership, as Taylor’s Version. There’s all of the Easter eggs that she has planted in music videos, social media posts, and interviews, offering clues and veiled messages to her legions of fans. There’s the nearly three-hour Eras Tour movie she released last October, and the hardcover tour book that she dropped in November. It’s also hard to forget her feud with Ticketmaster, which ultimately helped pave the way for a Justice Department lawsuit against the company and its parent firm, Live Nation Entertainment.
And then there’s the career-spanning Eras Tour, which by some estimates is set to funnel some $4.1 billion directly into Swift’s pocket.
For Gustafson, the Penn State Harrisburg professor, understanding Swift’s economic impact starts with seeing her as Swift Inc. When you start “thinking about her as a financial engine rather than as this artist,” he said, “you start realizing that the hundreds and hundreds of people below her, they’re all kind of at work to make this cultural product happen.”
A grid of four photos shows two people in Union Jack flag dresses and hats, people posing with friendship bracelets in a dark stadium, two people wearing pink cowboy hats and taking a selfie, and a cheering crowd with illuminated phones.
Clockwise from the top left: Swifties at Eras Tour stops in London, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, and Amsterdam in 2023 and 2024.Getty Images
The sun had yet to rise when Megan Wysocki clambered out of bed and rushed over to her local Target store in New Jersey. A student at American University, Wysocki is decidedly not a morning person, she told Foreign Policy—but this was something even she couldn’t miss.
She wasn’t alone. When Wysocki arrived at Target in the early hours of Nov. 29, a line had formed of people who were there for the same reason: snagging Swift’s self-published Eras Tour Book, a 256-page tome packed with more than 500 glossy images of Swift as well as her reflections. Swift released the book exclusively through the retailer on Black Friday, prompting eager fans to turn to Reddit to mastermind plans to secure a copy.
“Will people camp out? What time should I arrive?!” one Swiftie asked. “Obviously no one here can answer that question but I was curious if anyone had a game plan yet.”
Wysocki, for her part, appeared to be bracing for chaos. “Prior to going, I was fully expecting, like, it’s going to be unorganized … there’s going to be a stampede, I’m going to have to fight someone for this book,” she said, laughing. It was, mercifully, a fairly seamless process—no brawls necessary—and by the time she left the store at around 6:45 am, she said there were only two or three books left.
“I think if Bill Gates went and wrote a book, people would not be lining up at Target at 5:30 in the morning,” she added.
Wysocki’s purchase of the Eras Tour Book was just one of 814,000 print copy sales of the volume over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Those sales smashed yet another record for Swift: the biggest total first week print sales of 2024.
To see the Eras Tour in the United States, some fans paid steep prices, shelling out thousands on resold concert tickets alone. Others travelled abroad to Europe, where a stricter regulatory environment helped ensure that ticket prices were some 87 percent cheaper than they were in the United States. In Paris, for example, more than a quarter of tickets sold for Swift’s shows in the city were snapped up by Americans.
Top: A hillside covered with people. Bottom left: The back of a head with Eras Tour spelled out in sparkly gems. Bottom right: A person in a denim jacket with Taylor Swift iconography on it.
Top: Fans sit on Olympic Hill and wait for Swift’s concert to begin in Munich on July 27. Bottom: Fans with bejeweled attire in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, and Mexico City in 2023 and 2024.
Others tuned in online. At every show, tens of thousands of fans unable to attend in person would watch unofficial fan-organized livestreams, complete with shaky video footage, frenzied live chats, and even engagement proposals. It’s euphoric. It’s electric. It’s adoring. It’s Swiftiedom.
“Her fan base, I think, genuinely feels that she’s authentic, that they’re seeing a real her,” said Gustafson. “That sort of feeling of authenticity, and attachment to it, is really something that I think just draws fans in—that they’re not just consuming the movement; they’re actually a part of it with her.”
Whether you’re pining for a stranger who doesn’t know you exist, reeling from crushing heartbreak, experiencing the thrill and agony of a new crush, spiraling in self-doubt, recovering from professional setback, or reveling in a tender friendship, fans say, Taylor Swift has a song for you.
“She has mastered the art of autofiction and of taking stories that have happened to her—no matter how small—and turning them into these moments, through her songs, that we can relate to, that we can listen to, and experience, and grow with her,” said Winchester.
It’s a bond that spans generations. “When [I was] a young teenager, I found that my feelings weren’t taken as seriously … because, you know, I don’t even take my feelings as a 15-year-old as seriously as 15-year-old me would like,” said Olivia Kotarski, who co-hosts the Taylearning podcast with Winchester. “But Taylor Swift took them seriously when I was 15,” she said.
After the whirlwind of the Eras Tour, what’s next for Swift? Spending the holidays with beau Travis Kelce, for one. Professionally, Swift is sure to keep writing songs, and there are two more album rerecordings in the pipeline, said Stephanie Burt, a professor at Harvard University who taught a course called “Taylor Swift and Her World” and is writing a book on the popstar.
Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. But Burt is excited.
“We have no idea,” she said. “I just feel like it’s going to be awesome.”