Taylor Swift Vaults Into Billionaire Ranks With Blockbuster Eras Tour

The most definitive account yet of the pop star’s wealth shows she’s one of the few recording artists to build a 10-figure fortune almost entirely from her music

By Devon Pendleton, Claire Ballentine, Marie Patino, Chloe Whiteaker and Diana Li

October 26, 2023, 5:00 PM EDT

Taylor Swift’s Eras tour has generated as much money as the economies of small countries. The movie version is ruling the box office. Her new recording of a nine-year-old album, 1989, is expected to be one of the hottest-selling records of the year.

Taylor Swift performing during one of the Eras Tour shows, in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Swift is wearing a golden dress and has a silver, glittery guitar. She’s in front of a microphone and her arms are over her head, she makes a heart shape with her hands while smiling. The background is blurry but you can see small lights. The picture is cropped as a polaroid and has a blue/purple color to it.

Swift, as even the most casual pop-culture watchers can attest, is everywhere. And in one of the biggest years of her nearly two-decade career, she’s entered into even more rarefied status: billionaire.

The success of the Eras tour—a Super Bowl-sized event spanning numerous cities that has shattered records, sparked ticket frenzies and even caused the equivalent of a small earthquake—has propelled the pop star’s net worth past $1 billion, according to a Bloomberg News analysis. She’s one of the few entertainers to reach that status based on music and performing alone, the result of work and talent, but also canny marketing and timing.

Her prolific songwriting, negotiations around streaming and shrewd decision to re-record her first six albums have enabled her to create massive financial success at a time musicians have lost clout in the industry. The close relationship she’s cultivated with her millions of ardent fans has led to a more unified demographic than just about any political party, evidenced by the swapping of beaded Swift-inspired friendship bracelets that’s become a universal rite among concertgoers.

A graphic that illustrates Taylor Swift’s total net worth of $1.1 billion using orange pony beads. The beads are stacked in a row as if they are being used to construct a still unfinished bracelet that is stretched across a scale with axes lines marking every $200 million. Each bead represents $50 million and there are small gold beads that appear every 4 orange beads to mark $200 million as well. In total there are 22 orange beads, 5 gold beads, and 2 white pearl beads which just mark the beginning of the bracelet and do not count toward her wealth. There appears to be a string that runs through the beads, visible at both ends of the row and at one end curling to point with an arrow to text that explains why we are using beads and friendship bracelets as the method of illustrating Taylor’s wealth. Next to the bracelet there is a polaroid photo of a person’s hands working to create a bracelet over a plastic bead-organizing container. The person is wearing royal blue clothing, wearing a few beaded bracelets as well as a watch and daimond ring. The caption is overlaid on the bottom of the polaroid explaining that this is a concert-goer making a friendship bracelet at the show in Denver. There are a few stray beads sprinkled around the edges of the graphic.

Taken together, Swift Inc. is essentially a multinational conglomerate with the world’s most devoted customer base, its most charismatic CEO and significant economic power. The singer’s 53 US concerts this year added $4.3 billion to the country’s gross domestic product, according to estimates from Bloomberg Economics.

“In addition to being a generational talent, Taylor Swift is a great economist,” said Carolyn Sloane, a labor economist at the University of Chicago. “Taylor has great ideas, is able to scale her ideas and seems to be pretty risk-seeking.”

While estimates of Swift’s Eras profits abound, Bloomberg’s analysis is conservative and based only on assets and earnings that could be confirmed or traced from publicly disclosed figures. The calculation took into account the following: the estimated value of her music catalog and five homes, and earnings from streaming deals, music sales, concert tickets and merchandise.

The estimates account for the impact of income tax, tour production and travel costs, and commissions paid to managers and agents. Swift and her representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A graphic showcasing the breakdown of Taylor Swift’s $1.1Billion fortune. The data visualization is made out of beads that are lined up to form bracelets: each row of 10 beads represents $100 million, and each bead represents $10 million. The breakdown of her wealth goes like this. $400 million for the estimated value of music released by her since 2019. $370 million for ticket sales and merchandise. $120 million for spotify and youtube earnings. $100 million for the current value of five personal properties. $80 million for royalties from music sales. — Note: Earnings from music sales, streaming and concerts are net of estimated taxes and management commissions. Concert earnings are net of touring and production costs.

The Eras tour, set to resume with a nine-show South American leg next month, is an example of the symbiosis that’s characterized Swift’s career. After releasing a torrent of songs during the pandemic, the star returned to the concert circuit just as the live music-starved world was primed to spend, helping Eras rack up more than $700 million in ticket sales for shows performed to date, according to Bloomberg estimates. The average ticket cost $254, although many people paid far more on the resale market.

Swift herself got a mention in the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s June Beige Book for spurring growth in the city’s economy, while Fed Chair Jerome Powell indicated that spending on cultural phenomena like the Eras concerts, Beyonce’s Renaissance World Tour and the Barbie movie is on the radar of policymakers as they debate further interest-rate hikes and determine how the American consumer is faring.

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“The fact that people had the capacity to pay such high ticket prices is important,” said Brett House, professor of professional practice in economics at Columbia Business School. “It was a confluence of people having the savings, people having the desire to spend and the fact that she produced a number of albums that for many people were the soundtrack of the pandemic.”

A map of Swift’s Eras Tour showing every city in which she’s performed so far, starting with Glendale, Arizona, on March 17 ending in Mexico city in August. Swift will do nine more shows in South America in november. The rest of her international tour will take place in 2024. Along the way, the map showcases small photos of Swift performing in, and the photos are shaped like small polaroids. On the map are economic impact figures for some of the cities she stopped in. In Tampa, Florida, there was a $26 million increase in visitor spending compared to the two weeks before and after the event. In Minneapolis, Minnesota hotel revenue was nearly $6 million compared to $2.7 million for the same weekend the prior year. In Houston, Texas, City-wide revenue for the weekend was $34 million,up 136% from the same period in 2019. In Seattle, Washington, downtown hotel revenues reached a record high of $7.4 million on the first night of the Eras tour. On the map, the tour route is depicted as a dashed black line overlaid on an outline of the United States that’s made out of small purple beads. — Sources: Local tourism organizations, Swift’s account on the social media platform X

Those economic forces also benefited Beyonce, another untouchable cultural phenomenon who commands similar commercial influence over her devout fan-following, the Beyhive. Her recently wrapped Renaissance tour grossed $579 million, according to Live Nation.

A picture of Beyonce performing during her renaissance tour. She is smiling and her hair looks flowy. Behind her are dancers, waving their hands on each side of Beyonce as she walks. Beyonce is wearing a shiny jumpsuit with hands depicted on it, and black gloves. The picture is cropped as a polaroid.

But Swift still has 89 more shows to go. She also has a candid and chatty repartee with her millions of predominantly-young fans who’ve grown up with the 33-year-old singer in an age where trust and intimacy is established online quite naturally. The internet has allowed Swift to effectively market to her fan base far more easily than culturally dominant stars of yore, like Madonna or Michael Jackson.

Part of that involves constantly releasing merchandise that fans are eager to purchase, said Alice Enders, who follows the music industry as head of research at Enders Analysis and is a former senior economist at the World Trade Organization. “There’s this whole ecosystem she has, and it’s very lucrative for her.”

Their ardor has driven sales of concert tickets, but also vinyl records, bracelets and beads, sequins, plane tickets and billions of streams of songs both new and recently re-recorded. Swift’s apparent romance with NFL star Travis Kelce has sent game viewership ratings soaring and at one point spiked sales of his jersey by 400%.

Sustaining such fan fervor will be challenging in the post-Eras era. Few US stars have avoided some degree of backlash as their fame soared, and even Swift has experienced brief turnabouts in public perception following unpopular romances and an old feud with the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.

A graphic illustrating Taylor Swift’s pre-tax profits from each of her six tours to date. Each tour is represented as a horizontal line of bracelet beads, with each thick pony bead representing $5 million and each narrow clay bead representing $1 million. There are also small gold beads that mark every $20 million. Each tour has its own color scheme, and there are two shades of beads for each tour to differentiate between profits made from ticket sales and profits made from merchandise sold. The beads stretch along a scale with axes lines that mark every $40 million. The scale goes up to $200 million, while the longest string of beads belongs to the Eras tour, from which Swift profited $225 million so far. The Eras tour is comprised of 34 thick, light-pink beads, 3 thin light-pink beads (which together represent money from ticket sales) and 10 thick, dark-pink beads and 2 thin dark-pink beads (which together represent money from merchandise). In descending length, the next tour is Reputation, comprised of 17 thick light green beads for ticket sales and 5 thick dark green beads and 1 thin dark green bead for merchandise. Next is 1989, comprised of 7 thick red beads and 2 thin red beads representing ticket sales, 1 thick pink bead and 5 thin pink beads representing merchandise. Speak Now is comprised of 6 thick lavender beads representing ticket sales and 1 thick and 1 thin purple beads representing merchandise. The final tour is Fearless, represented with 3 thick golden-yellow beads and 1 thin golden-yellow bead representing ticket sales. There are no beads for merchandise from that tour. — Profit is net of production costs, venue fees and commissions to agents and managers, before tax. Profit for Fearless tour merchandise excluded to be conservative.

Sources: Billboard Boxscore, Pollstar, Bloomberg reporting

Yet her fans have stood by her—and multiplied—as Swift has evolved from a teen pop-country phenom to a world-famous celebrity, while maintaining an earnest, girl-with-a-guitar image that belies the machine behind her. A small team includes her father Scott, a longtime Merrill employee whose registered investment adviser The Swift Group is based in the family’s hometown of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. A disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission lists him as linked to 10 companies affiliated with his daughter, including merchandising and rights-management businesses and entities that own her tour bus, two private jets and real estate.

a Young Taylor Swift playing the guitar and singing on a stage where the backdrop reads “home essentials”. She is accompanied by a man wearing sunglasses who’s playing the banjo. The foreground of the picture features multiple people listening to the performance.

Swift’s fandom also has helped the star upend industry trends by making her one of the rare artists to sell significant volumes of physical music, including vinyl albums and even CDs, whose sales are more lucrative per-item to an artist than a streamed song. Her earnings from both stand to multiply in future years thanks to her move to gain more control over her music rights.

Swift five years ago split with the Nashville record label that launched her career, and expressed rage when the master rights to her first six albums—which were owned by the label—were subsequently sold twice over, most recently to an investment firm started with Disney family money.

In an act of telegraphed vengeance and liberty, she began re-recording those albums, securing control over the rights and simultaneously diluting the value of her original masters. That’s thrust decade-plus-old songs back into the top of the Billboard charts and swayed streaming algorithms to prioritize music denoted “Taylor’s version”—while producing more content for her zealous fans to buy. The Oct. 27 release of her re-recording of 1989, her top-selling album, is expected to include five previously unreleased songs.

A graphic comprised of 8 circles made from physical jewelry beads to look like friendship bracelets. Each beaded bracelet represents the value of a recording artist’s catalog, with larger bracelets indicating high prices for a catalog and smaller bracelets indicating lower prices. Each bracelet has the artist’s name spelled out with letter beads and the dollar value and details of the deal are included by each bracelet. The artists included for comparison, in order of size, are Bruce Springsteen with one of the largest bracelets in purple beads representing $550 million, Taylor Swift has two bracelets representing the upper and lower bounds of estimates for the value of her catalog. The lower bound is a colorful bracelet representing $400M, a bit smaller than Springsteen’s. The upper bound is represented with an alternating black and white beaded bracelet, the largest of all, scaled to equal $1 billion. David Bowie’s bracelet is smaller than Taylor’s lower-bound, with orange beads representing $250 million. Next is Katy Perry, in red beads, representing $225 million. Then Justin Bieber, in blue beads, representing $200 million. Then Justin Timberlake in green beads and Stevie Nicks in yellow beads, both the same size representing $100 million. — Sources: Reported transactions, Bloomberg reporting

Keeping rights is gaining importance for artists as music catalogs become more popular for investors as an alternative asset. Musicians from Bruce Springsteen ($550 million) to Justin Bieber ($200 million) have sold all or some of their music rights to private equity firms or specialty investment funds, like Hipgnosis, which intend to profit from the royalty streams.

For less-established musicians, Swift’s retaking of her recordings has served as a cri de coeur of sorts, said Ralph Jaccodine, a professor of music business and management at Boston’s Berklee College of Music.

“It opened up a conversation among a new generation of artists and managers and labels, how do you make it more fair for the artist?” he said. “All of a sudden my students know about copyright and masters.”

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Spotify’s payouts to musicians can be nanoscopic on a per-stream basis—industry estimates peg it at around .0038 cents on average. Revenue per stream has fallen by 20% since 2017, though consumption of music streams has jumped by 2.5 times, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. research, leaving artists in a better financial spot, at least compared to the pirating heyday of the early 2000s. Megastars like Swift, who famously quit Spotify over what she deemed unfair royalties to artists (she later rejoined), can negotiate better terms.

Then there’s the value of her catalog itself. Given Swift’s extraordinarily large and devoted fanbase, reams of hits and potential to be popular well into the future, experts in music valuation said her total catalog could feasibly be worth $1 billion. Not all of that would go to Swift if she were to sell. There are other parties to consider, including co-writers, her publishing and recording partner, Universal Music Group, not to mention agents, advisers and attorneys.

Swift has generations of missteps to learn from. The Beatles’ main songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, lost the publishing rights to their music early in their career. When the rights came up for auction years later, McCartney was outbid by Michael Jackson. Prince changed his name to a symbol over a contract dispute with Warner Music.

It’s touring, though, that’s emerged as one of the most lucrative endeavors for musicians. Their cut of gross ticket sales is much higher than from streams or sales, and merchandise revenue is a bonus. Proven legends on the tour circuit can negotiate with venues for an even more favorable rate. Jimmy Buffett was able to take home 105% of his shows’ ticket sales, since venue owners knew they’d still profit from booze-buying, tailgating Parrot Heads.

Swift has taken that even further, bypassing movie studios to personally fund the Eras film, which generated $92.8 million at the box office in its opening weekend. The tour is heading to Asia, Australia and Europe next year, offering new money-making opportunities and bringing the Swiftie stimulus to other countries.

With the world struggling with rising interest rates, inflation and regional wars, it remains to be seen whether the countries set to host her over the next year will enjoy a similar bump to their economies. Much depends on whether concert attendees can spend with the zeal of the Americans and if the post-pandemic hunger for live gatherings continues unabated.

But even when the tour hype fades and Swift’s not at the apex of global pop culture, she’ll have millions in earnings to show for her reign in this moment of entertainment history. At just 33, she has vast future earnings potential.

“Every endorsement, partnership and business move she makes is part of a broader, meticulously-constructed plan,” said Stacy Jones, founder of marketing agency Hollywood Branded. “It’s not just impressive, it’s masterful.”

With assistance from Lucas Shaw

Edited by Kara Wetzel and Kristine Owram

Photographers: East Rutherford and Santa Clara: Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images; Denver (2): Grace Smith/Getty Images; Inglewood: Allen J. Schaben/Getty Images; Foxborough: Scott Eisen/Getty Images; Nashville: George Walker IV/AP Photo; Atlanta: Terence Rushin/Getty Images; Beyoncé: Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty Images; Joliet: Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images; Los Angeles: Valerie Macon/AFP/Getty Images.

Still life photography by Zack DeZon

Photo editor Marie Monteleone

Methodology

Bloomberg News spoke to more than a dozen experts in the music business, event production, music licensing and valuation, event merchandising and real estate fields to inform the estimates.

Earnings from music sales were calculated based on data on physical and digital sales compiled by ChartMasters and Luminate and assuming an average profit margin across categories of 60%.

Streaming earnings are calculated based on total streams on two platforms, Spotify and YouTube, and applying an average royalty-per stream of $.0038 for Spotify and $.002 for YouTube.

Earnings from touring were estimated using gross ticket totals as reported by Billboard Boxscore and assuming Swift received 35% of ticket revenue after production costs, stadium fees and payments to booking agents. The Eras Tour revenue was calculated based on the average ticket price according to Pollstar multiplied by the number of tickets sold for shows performed as of Oct. 11, 2023. Merchandising earnings were calculated based on guidance from touring and merchandising professionals on volume and production costs.

Swift’s earnings across all categories reflect an estimated 20-30% commission paid to personal management, such as attorneys and advisers, and assumes she paid income taxes at the highest marginal federal rate. To calculate her present value of cash from earnings, a return based on the MSCI World Index was applied for each year since 2007.

Her music catalog is valued based on the opinion of three independent experts in music business finance and valuation. A discount of 20% is applied to the lowest end of their average suggested range to account for advisory fees in the case of a sale, illiquidity, and the dilutionary risk posed by the existence of duplicate masters for her first six albums.

Her personal real estate is valued based on opinions of local property agents and Zillow estimates, where available. The analysis assumes she paid cash for the homes and also accounts for gratuities paid to tour staff in 2023.

Certain payouts were excluded due to a lack of transparency around their amounts. This includes any advances she received from her former and current music publishing partners, Big Machine and Universal, and any money she’s earned from endorsement deals. The analysis accounts for her funding The Eras Tour movie but doesn’t reflect any income she may have received from it.

Taylor Swift Vaults Into Billionaire Ranks With Blockbuster Eras Tour

The most definitive account yet of the pop star’s wealth shows she’s one of the few recording artists to build a 10-figure fortune almost entirely from her music

Taylor Swift Is a Billionaire

How Swift’s Millions Stack Up

Cities Got a Friendly Boost From The Eras Tour

Eras Takes Money-Making to a Whole New Level

Swift’s Cache of Hits Could Rival the Boss’s

Methodology