Swiftenomics: Australian leg of Eras Tour expected to generate $136 million in activity
Early Eras Tour concerts in the United States made the singer-songwriter about $US13 million ($19 million) a night, according to Bloomberg, and generated considerable economic activity for the communities involved.
“We actually think the total spend will be in the order of $136 million, or $135.8 million to be precise,” Venues NSW chief executive Kerrie Mather told RN Breakfast.
“It’ll be a very significant economic contributor to New South Wales.”
Frontier Touring is responsible for bringing Taylor Swift out to Australia and predicts 60,000 interstate visitors and 6,000 international visitors across the four concerts in Sydney.
“An event like Taylor Swift attracts significant interstate and international visitation, which means that people actually come, and they stay at hotels, or Airbnb, they actually go out to dinner, they go to bars and restaurants,” Ms Mather said.
“We have thousands of staff that work for a wide range of companies on the event day to support the concert.”
With four back-to-back concerts at Sydney’s Accor Stadium, it will be a concert like no other for the city.
“By comparison, the New Year’s Test is five days in a row [of] 30,000 people and it’s New South Wales’s largest annual sporting event,” Ms Mather said.
“This will be 80,000 people per night; the total attendees will be around 300,000.”
Swiftenomics is serious business
The economic impact of Taylor Swift is now spilling into different sectors.
The United States’ largest newspaper chain, Gannett, hired a full-time journalist dedicated to the Taylor Swift beat.
When the pop star attended her boyfriend Travis Kelce’s NFL game, she boosted sales of his No. 87 jersey by about 400 per cent, according to Fanatics, which sells the league’s merchandise.
Forbes declared the 12-time Grammy winner part of the billionaires club last year, but the difference for Swift is her wealth is solely based on her music catalogue and tours, not having side hustles like a beauty line.
By the end of her Eras Tour, The Washington Post estimates she could have contributed $US5.7 billion ($8.3 billion) to the US economy.
“Some people do kind of turn their nose up and go, ‘she’s a pop star, I don’t really get it, why should we be taking her seriously?’,” RMIT University’s fan studies expert Kate Pattison said.
“She’s broken so many records when it comes from a music perspective, she recently overtook a Barbra Streisand and an Elvis Presley record.
“I guess people haven’t taken it as seriously as maybe rock music or sport or other types of more masculine fandoms.”
While there is plenty of praise and celebration for Swift, there is also criticisms about her career and the fan following she’s created.
Ms Pattison believes some of that criticism comes from a long-standing perception of fans of females and female-led movements.
Swift’s concerts at the Melbourne Cricket Ground are set to be some of the biggest of her career, and she’s sold out three back-to-back shows.
The director of the Social Change Enabling Impact Platform at RMIT University, Lisa Given, is behind a free fanposium event in the lead-up to the Eras Tour launching in Melbourne, featuring some of the world’s leading experts in music and pop culture.
“We wanted to kind of bring people together, there are so many fans in the city, as well as researchers and experts who know a lot about Taylor Swift,” Professor Given said.
“A lot of people might look at Taylor Swift and think this is just about 13-year-old girls or something, but that’s not true.
SOURCE: ABCNEWS