The end of Eras: where does Taylor Swift go from here?

“THERE WILL NEVER be anything like this again,” said Penny, the very excitable twenty-something sitting next to us on the flight to Toronto—or “Tay-ronto,” as she explained, since we were on our way to the next-to-last stop on Taylor Swift’s record-breaking, earth-quaking Eras Tour. The middle of November, she pulled out her phone to show us the final hours ticking away on the 456-day countdown that she set when she scored her ticket, and she gave us friendship bracelets to match our own favorite eras (Folklore for me, Midnights for my wife).

After we touched down, you could see Swifties pouring out of every gate, from every destination, all on their way to the first weekend of six sold-out shows at the Rogers Centre stadium. (United Airlines saw a 25 percent increase in demand for flights to cities hosting Swift concerts, and Southwest added flights to accommodate demand for travel to shows in their markets.) It was startling to see a whole airport overrun with packs of friends, mothers and daughters, and happy stray loners all obviously making the pilgrimage.

The scene brought the unimaginable statistics to life: After becoming the first tour in history to pass $1 billion in revenue, when the final numbers are tallied, the grosses might actually top $2 billion. We may never know precise total ticket sales, but they could approach a staggering ten million.

This weekend, the Eras Era comes to an end with the concluding three shows in Vancouver. More than two years after announcing her first batch of appearances, Swift has performed 152 shows across five continents. Market research firm QuestionPro estimated that the tour added $5 billion to the global economy. Penny’s assessment might just be right.

So as the biggest live phenomenon of all time wraps up, one week before Taylor Alison Swift’s 35th birthday, what did it all mean? Did it live up to your Wildest Dreams, or did you just Tolerate It? Did it help us through a Cruel Summer, all the way Back to December? And, for real for real, Is It Over Now?

Much attention, including Time magazine naming Swift its 2023 Person of the Year, has been paid to the clamour for tickets and the tour’s financial and social impact. But before we get there, let’s start with the origins of the Eras show itself. The challenge Swift faced at its outset was that she had been planning to perform in 2020, but those dates were blown up by the pandemic. None of us knew, as she reminded us onstage in Toronto, when or if we could be “all in the same room, singing the same words, which is kind of the most awesome thing in the world.”

Instead, she directed her energy into two new studio albums that year, followed by another in 2022 – which meant that by the time venues had reopened and she was ready to return to the road, she had a backlog of four albums’ worth of material she had never played on stage, plus the dozens of new tracks she added on her “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings of her earlier albums, the ownership of which had been sold by her previous record label.

But rather than just pick up with a show centred on Midnights, her most recent release at the time, Swift concocted a tour that featured all the different stages of her career – a wildly ambitious, nearly three-and-a-half-hour set with more than 40 songs, complete with different visuals, colour schemes, and costumes for each of the ten acts. It was logistically crazy, risking chaos and incoherence (and she added a degree of difficulty when she released The Tortured Poets Department earlier this year and had to layer in one more Era, dubbing the new section “Female Rage: The Musical”).

Staged and choreographed with the precision of a Broadway musical, the show also boasted an acoustic “surprise songs” slot and ever-changing outfits, adding spontaneity that caused Swifties around the globe to follow every night like Deadheads trading setlists; by tour’s end, more than a million people were playing the online “Mastermind” game, guessing each performance’s wild cards. It was an absolute creative triumph, undoubtedly the Greatest Show on Earth.

The Toronto concert was even more impressive than I remember from an early Eras stop at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium in May 2023, somehow both grander and more intimate. The perpetual-motion production was dazzling start to finish, the staging had gotten even tighter, the dramatic black-and-white of the Tortured Poets section contributed an edgier dimension, the surprise songs hit harder. And the audience, even at stadium scale, had made the show feel even more their own – the night was one elaborate, heart-bursting ritual, from the flood of friendship bracelets to the shouted-out lines and gestures that fans had synchronised on their own.

Then there’s everything that transpired offstage. “The Eras Tour has been going on for a year and a half,” said Swift, “and a lot of life can happen, a lot of art can happen, in that time.” Take a deep breath and let’s recap.

The drama began even before the tour did; one of the prospective sponsors was the disgraced crypto company FTX, a $100 million deal that mercifully fell through. On the first day of the U.S. ticket presale, an unprecedented 2.4 million tickets were sold, resulting in software crashes that prompted a string of anti-scalping laws and price-regulation policies and scrutiny of Ticketmaster by Congress for monopolistic practices.

Overseas, Singapore was the only Eras Tour stop in Southeast Asia, leading to diplomatic tensions in the region. An audience member died due to heat exhaustion at the Rio de Janeiro show, and a failed ISIS terror plot meant cancellation of the Vienna dates. Three little girls were stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop in the English town of Southport, followed by a political scandal when Prime Minister Keir Starmer was given free tickets to a Wembley concert after increasing Swift’s security in London.

When the second North American leg of the tour was announced and Canada was not included on the initial itinerary, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posted a thirsty plea on social media: “It’s me, hi. I know places in Canada would love to have you. So, don’t make it another cruel summer.” He got his wish when Swift added the final stops to the schedule, and she later called her Canadian followers her most “loyal, passionate, kind, thoughtful fans” – but then Trudeau faced a scandal of his own when he was seen dancing at one of the Toronto shows while pro-Palestinian riots were raging outside a NATO assembly in Montreal.

In addition to the economic boost of the ticket sales and accompanying travel, Swift upended several other industries along the way. An Eras Tour concert film, shot at the Los Angeles dates, was released in October 2023. Bypassing the movie studios, Swift did a deal directly with the AMC theatre chain and the project took in $267 million, making it the highest-grossing concert film of all time.

In a similar deal, Swift printed an Eras Tour coffee-table book herself, skipping the publishing industry and releasing it exclusively at Target on Black Friday; it sold more than 800,000 copies over the holiday, the second-biggest nonfiction book launch ever (behind only Barack Obama’s presidential memoir A Promised Land), though fans quickly spotted some blurry printing and typos, a rare example of a crack in her perfectionism.

Finally – sigh – there was Taylor’s personal life during the Eras years. When the tour was announced, and even when it opened in Glendale, Arizona, in March 2023, she was still involved with British actor Joe Alwyn. Her first few months on the road were accompanied by a brief fling with Matty Healy, lead singer of The 1975 (and the apparent inspiration for the fury behind many of the Tortured Poets songs), before she started dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce in the summer of 2023 – leading, you may recall, to various conspiracy theories that this modern-day Marilyn and DiMaggio were a deep-state plant by the vaccination industry or some such nonsense.

It’s tricky to find the proper comparisons for the Eras Tour and for Swift’s soaring popularity. Is this like Michael Jackson at the height of Thriller, or even like Beatlemania? The recent release of the Beatles ’64 documentary led to some rather hilarious analogies; the site clutchpoints.com referred to the Fab Four as “the first Taylor Swift-like craze.”

But culture and our entertainment choices have gotten way too diffuse for the kind of dominance that saw the Beatles draw one third of America’s population to watch them on The Ed Sullivan Show or allowed Thriller to sell 34 million copies; in a streaming universe, Swift’s top-selling album is 2008’s Fearless, certified for the equivalent of just 8 million sales. Despite the endless media onslaught, plenty of people still aren’t really familiar with her music. We saw that there are in fact limitations to her influence when her much-coveted endorsement wasn’t enough to win the White House for Kamala Harris (though it did inspire typically sophisticated statesmanship from our president-elect, who posted “I HATE Taylor Swift!”).

Still, the Eras Tour unarguably raised the stakes for superstar artists in its conception, its production, and its creation of community. The scope conveyed a sense of her songs as a true body of work — it felt like seeing a legacy artist, a Paul McCartney or Billy Joel, using a concert to cover the full story of their career, but with the tireless dancing and spectacle and style of a young artist at her peak and still somehow getting bigger. Swift’s pursuit of absolute control – from the show to her retention of her own master recordings, and now the movie and book – illustrate the true independence that creators have always aspired to.

The tour, with all its attendant hoopla and exultation and gossip and intrigue, solidified Swift’s relationship with her already-obsessive audience even further. The underlying message of the show – the notion that all of us are the sum of our different phases and stages, that previous incarnations of ourselves are not something to hide from or be ashamed of but to embrace and celebrate – was powerful and resonant, especially for women.

For whatever it’s worth, for the last few years, I have judged a Taylor Swift karaoke contest for a local New York City charity. In 2023, it was fun – there were some kids, choreographed “Shake It Off” routines, heartfelt deliveries of ballads. In 2024, though, it was serious. Not in a competitive sense; Swifties are all about supporting each other. But these performances were intense, profoundly personal. There wasn’t a single radio hit selected, just deep cuts that signalled feelings and experiences that these young people felt an overwhelming need to express, with these songs as the vehicle.

So at the End of the Eras, what happens now? There are some obvious options, like a live album and of course the two albums (her 2006 debut and 2018’s Reputation) that haven’t yet received the “Taylor’s Version” treatment. But what else is out there? What other new worlds can Swift conquer?

I won’t venture a guess regarding her next Era, but I don’t think it will be long until we hear from her again. With anyone else, you would expect them to disappear for a while, to rest and figure out their next moves. “I know when we have sad moments or hard times or when we’re having a rough day,” she said in Toronto, “we’re going to think back on memories from this tour.”

But Taylor Swift has never shown any interest in, or any patience for, the concept of “downtime,” and when she looks back, it’s usually with a purpose. She always seems to know exactly where she’s going. The question is, like the song says, are you ready for it?

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This story first appeared on Esquire US.

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