Taylor Swift took the crown from Queen B as her blockbuster Eras Tour earned her $300 million, more than double what Beyoncé took home for her record-breaking Renaissance Tour.
“I can’t believe I get to do music as a career,” Taylor Swift said at the Los Angeles premiere of her new concert film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, before an audience of more than 2,000 Swifties that included Adam Sandler, Mariska Hargitay, Simu Liu, and even Beyoncé. “That’s crazy. I’ve always had so much fun doing it. I’ve never had this much fun in my life as I have had on The Eras Tour. It is far and away just the most electric experience of my life.”
It’s also the most lucrative. Beginning in March and ending in August, Swift played 56 stadium shows across 20 U.S. cities and Mexico City, grossing more than $780 million and earning the 33-year-old pop queen an estimated $305 million.
Spanning nearly two decades and 10 albums, the Eras Tour is more than a retrospective of Swift’s career, it’s also a financial phenomenon. Because of the tremendous economic impact concert tours have on cities, Swift and Beyoncé–who pocked an estimated $145 million from her record-breaking Renaissance World Tour this summer—were credited by Morgan Stanley for adding $5.4 billion to the U.S. economy in the third quarter.
Both superstars will continue to reap millions with the release of their concert movies. Swift’s, which cost a reported $15 million to produce, according to the New York Times, is expected to earn upwards of $125 million at the domestic box office in its opening weekend and another $60 million internationally. Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé, premieres December 1. (Forbes’ estimates in this story do not include potential or pre-sale grosses from the films.)
But not every dollar spent on a tour goes directly into the headliner’s pocket. “When you’re doing tours of this magnitude, you could have a staff of hundreds doing services on the road,” Jarred Arfa, head of global music at Independent Artists Group, which represents Billy Joel and Metallica, among many others, tells Forbes. “The list is never ending.”
The massive scale of a global tour typically includes bandmates, backup singers and dancers, crew members, sound engineers and lighting and stage designers, all of whom move from city to city with the headlining artist. Of course, venues need to be rented, and in the case of stadium superstars, transformed from a field to a stage. On the business side, there’s also a headliner’s manager and agent, as well as the promoter and the ticketing company, all of whom get a cut of the gross revenue.
Higher ticket prices—and Swift’s were estimated to be $253 on average, earning her about $10 to $13 million a night—doesn’t necessarily mean higher take-home pay for an artist. The costs of trucking and freight have increased significantly since the pandemic, and touring internationally typically costs more than putting on shows in the U.S.
For a tour to be profitable, acts have to “gross a significant amount of money across a lot of dates,” Arfa says.
