A Look Back at Taylor Swift's Record-Breaking Eras Tour
More than 630 days after Taylor Swift's Eras Tour kicked off on March 17 2023, in Glendale, Ariz., the global concert phenomenon came to an end following three final shows in Vancouver, British Columbia, this weekend.
By the end of its 66-show run in 2023, Swift's painstakingly crafted musical extravaganza had earned over $1 billion to become the highest-grossing concert tour of all time. Since then, she has performed an additional 83 shows, propelling that number into the stratosphere—and helping turn Swift into the first musician to become a billionaire solely from songwriting and performing.
In the nearly two years since Eras began, Swift's accomplishments have been numerous, from dropping three albums to being named TIME's 2023 Person of the Year to releasing the most successful concert film of all time to breaking untold records. And her popularity shows no signs of waning any time soon.
Still, it's an emotional time for both fans and Swift herself, who told the audience at her final Toronto show on Nov. 23 that she was "having a bit of a moment" after tearing up onstage. "My band, my crew, all of my fellow performers, we have put so much of our lives into this," she said. "And you’ve put so much of your lives into being with us tonight and to giving us that moment that we will never forget."
It seems safe to say that there's never been a concert tour quite like Eras. So in honor of the final three shows, we're taking a numerical look back at the biggest two years of Swift's career to date.
Number of Eras shows and cities
In total, Swift will have played 149 shows across five continents and 51 cities worldwide as of Dec. 8. Of those shows, 62 took place in the U.S. in 23 different cities stateside. The remaining 90 were part of the Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Canada legs of the tour.
Distance traveled by Eras attendees
Fans traveled an average distance of 338 miles for the Eras Tour, according to data from ticket exchange and resale company Vivid Seats. That's a 125% increase on the average of 150 miles they traveled for her Reputation Stadium Tour in 2018 and a 248% increase on the average of 97 miles they traveled for her first-ever headlining tour, the Fearless Tour, which opened in 2009 and ran through 2010.
Number of surprise songs
In addition to her 44-plus-song set list, Swift has played at least two acoustic "surprise songs" per Eras show. In 2023, she performed 125 different songs (counting mashups of repeat songs as unique entries) as her 133 surprise offerings. During that run of shows, she told fans she wouldn't repeat a surprise song unless she messed it up the first time or it was from her 2022 album Midnights, which she described as "the most accurate picture of [her] life to date." However, at her last show of 2023, in São Paulo, Brazil, she announced that all of her tracks would be “fair game” to repeat when the tour picked back up in the new year. In 2024, with the slate wiped clean, she has performed 160 different surprise songs, many of which have been unique mashups of multiple tracks. She is set to reveal at least six more surprise songs at the final three shows of the tour in Vancouver for a grand total of 299.
Read more: All the Song Mashups Taylor Swift Has Played During the Eras Tour
Number of special guests
From Sabrina Carpenter to Paramore to Gracie Abrams, Swift's Eras stops have featured 19 different opening acts. She has also brought out 10 other special guests, from frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff to her boyfriend, NFL star Travis Kelce, to join her on stage at various shows.
Number of Eras tickets sold
Following the final Vancouver show on Dec. 8, Swift’s team reported that the singer had sold 10,168,008 tickets across her 149 sold-out performances for an average of 68,241 tickets per show. (Those totals would have been higher if Swift hadn’t had to cancel three shows in Vienna in August due to safety concerns over terrorist threats.)
Total Eras Tour gross
Eras sold an astronomical total of over $2.078 billion in tickets, according to Swift’s production company, making it the first tour to not only cross the $1 billion mark but more than double that benchmark. That’s more than the forecasted 2024 GDP of 18 small countries. For comparison, the second-highest grossing tour of all time, Elton John’s nearly five-year Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour, sold six million tickets across 328 shows to earn $939 million.
Read more: How Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Inspired Two New Christmas Movies
Total Eras merch revenue
According to reports from different venues, Pollstar estimates Eras attendees were spending an average of $40 per person on merch at the first 60 Eras shows. That puts Swift's tour merch revenue at an estimated $440.8 million—not including non-concert day purchases—following her final run of 2024 Eras dates.
The TTPD effect
After debuting two re-recorded albums, Speak Now (Taylor's Version) and 1989 (Taylor's Version), and one single, "You're Losing Me (From the Vault)," during the 2023 run of the Eras Tour, Swift dropped a brand new 31-song double album, The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD), in April 2024. In its first week of sales, TTPD, which became the first album to claim every slot in the top 14 spots of the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously, sold 2.61 million equivalent album units and tallied 891.37 million official streams (the largest streaming week for an album ever), according to industry data provider Luminate. It also became her 14th No. 1 album on the Billboard 200, tying Jay-Z's record for most No. 1 albums by a solo artist. Only the Beatles, with 19, have more. Following the album's release, Swift began incorporating a new block of seven TTPD songs that she described as "Female Rage: The Musical" into her Eras set list.
Read more: Taylor Swift Is Halfway Through Her Rerecording Project. It’s Paid Off Big Time
The Eras Tour Book sales
Leading up to the final weekend of Eras, Swift released a 256-page coffee table book containing over 500 photos and anecdotes from the record-breaking tour. Despite only being available for purchase through one retailer, Target, the $40 Eras Tour Book sold 814,000 copies in its first two days on sale, according to industry data provider Circana BookScan. That's the second-highest number of books sold in a single reporting week since BookScan began tracking sales in 2001, surpassed only in the nonfiction category by Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, which sold 816,000 copies when it first went on sale in 2020.
Write to Megan McCluskey at megan.mccluskey@time.com.