Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour set a new bar that will never be reached again

• Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour ended in Vancouver on Sunday.
• The tour was an unprecedented financial success, becoming the first to gross more than $2 billion.
• It was a spectacle of endurance and nostalgia that will be difficult for any artist, Swift included, to replicate.

Twenty-one months, 149 shows and approximately 484 hours of singing and dancing later, Taylor Swift took her final bow on the Eras Tour on Sunday.

“You’ve made this something completely different from anything I’ve ever done in my life,” Swift told the Vancouver audience. “With your traditions, with your passion, with the way you care for this tour – it is unparalleled. I’ve never experienced anything like this.”

The Eras Tour was widely hailed as a cultural phenomenon and money-making marvel. Swift’s tour has boosted local economies around the world, from the US to the UK to Singapore. Fans spent thousands to see their idol perform a marathon full of hits from her catalog (plus a few surprise deep cuts), a spectacle that lasted over three hours each night. In the end, the Eras Tour became the first tour in history to gross over $2 billion, Swift’s production company confirmed to The New York Times.

But while that may all be true, there’s reason to believe that not even Swift’s commercial juggernaut has the power to change the touring landscape forever. The Eras Tour will go down in history as a pinnacle moment for the industry, an artist he’ll struggle to match again – Swift included.

A literal billionaire, Swift set a standard with his Eras Tour that most artists can’t reach. In an industry where you have to spend money to make money, most artists who aren’t global superstars don’t have that much money to spend. In fact, touring costs are so high that even major artists like Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny and The Black Keys are canceling dates or entire tours.

In contrast, Swift has spent nearly two decades building her loyal customer base and billion-dollar fortune. She’s one of the few stars perfectly capable of traveling the world, employing a crew of hundreds, and bringing her elaborate stagecraft to life without having to worry about the upfront costs.

But even those with the resources don’t necessarily have the desire to complete a tour as intense as Swift’s. Billie Eilish, who broke Swift’s own record as the youngest artist in history to win Album of the Year at the 2020 Grammys, now has three albums to her credit and is currently touring with “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” also receiving critical acclaim critics received.

In Swiftian terms, Eilish is reversing her Speak Now era and riding a similar wave toward success. After seven or eight albums, would she be able to put on a three-and-a-half-hour retrospective of her career, a feat that requires months of intense cardio and dance training? Probably. Would she want to? Probably not.

“I’m not doing a three-hour show, that’s literally psychotic,” Eilish told fans in May, per Billboard. “Nobody wants that. You don’t want that. I do not want that. I don’t even want that as a fan. My favorite artist in the world, I try not to listen to them for three hours. “That’s way too long.”

For many artists it probably is. But Swift is a rare breed. Pulling off the Eras Tour required a special blend of ambition, financial freedom, physical endurance, fan adoration, commercial appeal and, let’s face it, smug bravado that, at least at this point in music history, was unique to Swift is alone.

In the concert film “The Eras Tour,” Swift admitted that people were skeptical of the concept at first – but she’s successful, wealthy, loved and stubborn enough that she was able to ignore her doubters.

The theme of “epochs” was also a particularly clever positioning for Swift at this moment in her career. After Swift’s former label sold her catalog without her permission in 2019, she began re-recording and re-releasing her first six albums, a project that challenged fans to rekindle their love for her old music – and her old self allow.

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Two of those re-recorded albums, “Fearless” and “Red,” were unveiled ahead of the Eras Tour, while two others, “Speak Now” and “1989,” were announced by Swift onstage. The two ventures worked together to legitimize each other by bringing fresh melodies to the tour’s acoustic sets and making Swifties feel like Swift, no matter how deep she was in the nearly two-year duration of her tour, when they saw her perform , was still fresh off a new release.

Swift signed a new record deal before Lover and owns all the albums she has released since then. Once she releases the final two installments of the Taylor’s Version series (“Reputation” and “Taylor Swift”), the Taylor’s Version project will be complete. Likewise, the special conditions that enabled the success of the Eras Tour will never occur again.

Of course, Swifties still have a lot to look forward to. She’s known to be prolific, so another brand new album isn’t out of the question in the coming years.

But even if Swift could release another 11 albums and launch the Eras Tour Part Two in another 18 years, would she want to? All signs point to no.

“I will never forget the call when I explained my idea of ​​the concept for the Eras Tour to my team. At the time, I was working on the Midnights album and if we were doing what I’ve always done, “I would have started planning the Midnights Tour,” Swift wrote in her new photography book.

“But there’s nothing I hate more than doing what I’ve always done.”