BURSTAfter a record-breaking $2bn global tour the mega-star is now looking to her next career step
Few artists in the history of pop music have had a year like Taylor Swift. The singer, who turns 35 today, started off 2024 as the most prominent spectator at the Super Bowl, where Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs delivered on a romcom ending. Her blockbuster Eras Tour, showcasing 18-plus years of music over a staggering 3.5 hours, continued 2023’s run as pop’s main story overseas and became the best-selling music tour in history. Her 11th studio album, the Tortured Poets Department, may have been a misfire with critics (myself included), but still broke streaming records and dominated the charts; she was Spotify’s most-streamed artist globally this year. The Eras Tour wrapped last weekend in Vancouver with more than $2bn in ticket sales from more than 10 million attendees – more than double the next all-time highest-grossing tour, in only 149 shows.
In short, Swift is operating in exceedingly rare company, at a scale unimaginable to most artists. Her closest pop peer is arguably Beyoncé, whose only standard and point of comparison is herself. (Both also, notably, rarely grant interviews.) Which raises the question: after a remarkable run of both ubiquity and good press, after the genuinely mind-boggling and commerce-shifting success of the Eras Tour, what next?
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