On St Patrick’s Day of this year, Taylor Swift kicked off her Eras Tour, a 52-stop showcase encompassing all ten of her studio albums. Since then, people have fallen into three categories: either you won the Ticketmaster lottery and attended the tour, a genuinely epic event in which the 33-year-old singer plays 44 or more songs over roughly three and a half hours; you did not get tickets, and have instead viewed innumerable videos of the show – her outfits, her choreography, her stage banter, the crowd, the celebrities; or you exist somewhere outside the Swiftie-verse and have been forced to pay attention to the Eras tour through consistent headlines and hype.
A Taylor Swift stadium tour – her first since 2018, owing to the pandemic – was always going to be an event. But the Eras Tour has surpassed mere pop spectacle and become an ongoing mass cultural moment. It exists in the physical world, bringing record-breaking crowds to a different US city each weekend. It has generated unceasing buzz, with headlines on anything from how demand broke Ticketmaster (and led to lawsuits and a congressional hearing) to her romantic life to how far people are willing to go for tickets. (One Massachusetts father, for example, shelled out $21k to go last-minute.) And it exists in a vast, ever-expanding digital world of clips, reactions, live-streams, dissections and analysis. After viewing a few videos several months ago, my discovery pages on Instagram and TikTok are still predominantly Eras Tour content; even the algorithm loves Taylor Swift.
