Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Is Even Bigger Than You Think — And These Streaming Stats Prove It
It’s generally expected within the industry that when you track a major artist’s streaming numbers while they’re on tour, you might see a slight uptick for the first week or two, which would recede gradually over the course of its dates. Maybe it briefly spikes if they have a newsy moment onstage at one stop, or if one song takes off as a new single or viral fan favorite — but even then, it’s contained to a song or two, not generally lifting the rest of the artist’s catalog along with it.
Unless, of course, you’re Taylor Swift.
Her Eras Tour, which launched in Glendale, Arizona on March 17, hasn’t launched a viral moment so much as the tour itself has gone viral, further spreading to every corner of the internet with every successive date. Each stop has dominated the news cycle for days, whether due to its special guests, its surprise songs, its celebrity attendees (particularly when one of them happened to be the lightning-rod frontman for a particular U.K. indie band), its Easter eggs, or its volcanic fan response — even the introduction of a new outfit to Swift’s rotation can be headline-worthy.
The impact of Swift’s Eras Tour on her catalog’s streaming numbers was, of course, immediate. The week of her opening three dates in Glendale, with every new mini-revelation about the tour’s design, structure and setlist blanketing the internet like wildfire smog, her official on-demand U.S. streams jumped 50%, according to Luminate. For an artist who already streams in the hundreds of millions every week, that’s a resounding, and extremely rare, leap to make for any reason short of a new album release or a death. (It should also be said that this gain does not even account the four new “Taylor’s Version” songs she released to help celebrate the tour’s kickoff; that gain would’ve been even larger had they been included.)
But that’s not even the jaw-dropping part. The really unprecedented thing about the Eras Tour’s streaming impact is that the initial bump did not start receding back to its usual sea level after a week or two — it continued to grow. And grow.
Eight weeks into the tour, as Swift was taking over Nashville with a trio of dates at Nissan Stadium and rumors of her and Matty Healy’s burgeoning relationship were beginning to swirl, those numbers were still rising — by then, they were up 83% total from the week before the tour launched. From there, Swift’s streaming numbers finally started to level off — but by Week 10 of the tour, she was still up 79% from where she was pre-Eras, earning hundreds of millions more streams weekly.
What makes these gains even more staggering is that they're not limited to just a song or two, or even a single Era: it's all across the show's setlist. In fact, of the 42 songs that Taylor Swift has played at every Eras date so far, 23 of them had at least doubled in weekly streams by the tour's 10th week, and all of them were up -- except for "Anti-Hero" and "Lavender Haze," her most recent singles when the tour started, which were coming down from their popularity peaks of months earlier.
You can see the 20 biggest gainers (in terms of total streams gained) here -- from the week before the Eras Tour started, to the week of the launch, to the 10th week of the tour:
And then, of course, there are the surprise songs: an additional two songs each concert that have rotated with every live date, delighting fans in attendance and often infuriating those missing out. Those have also seen major gains, with 48 of the 50 surprise songs she'd played at her 25 live dates through the chart week of May 25 increasing in streams the week she performed them, and most by percentages well into the double digits. (Only Midnights tracks "Snow on the Beach" and "Question?" did not benefit from the Eras bump.)
You can see the 20 biggest gainers (in terms of percentage gained) below, from the week before to the week of them being featured:
Can Swift keep the momentum going for another two months of Eras in this country -- and then maybe for a brief swing through Mexico in late August and South America this November? We'll find out soon enough -- her latest influx of Midnights-related goodies may help there as well -- but certainly, her Eras success has proven so far that betting the under with Taylor Swift in rarely a smart idea in 2023.