Taylor Swift released her new album “The Tortured Poets Department” at midnight, and, in what should be no surprise to anyone on this planet in the year 2024, it caused a scene.
Her songs were set to garner millions of streams from the moment it dropped, accompanied — no doubt — by a LOT of social media takes. Like the 13 Swift albums before it, there is also almost no doubt it will top the Billboard chart.
But no matter how many platinum certifications it collects or streams it racks up on Spotify, “The Tortured Poets Department” won’t be Swift’s biggest money-maker this year.
The remaining leg of her Eras tour — set to kick off in Paris next month and run through December — will instead be what contributes most to her fortune, which Bloomberg estimated last year at $1.1 billion.
“Live music is the engine of the global music business,” Clayton Durant, the founder of CAD Management and an adjunct professor at NYU Steinhardt’s Music Business Program, told Business Insider. “Her tour is probably going to earn 10 to 15 times more than her streaming.”
Swift’s Eras Tour brought in more than $1 billion in ticket sales last year over its 66 dates. By the end of this year, she will have played another 86. Swift’s cut is unknown, but based on industry standards, she will surely earn nine figures in 2024 from ticket sales.
Concerts don’t only bring in money from ticket sales.
Pollstar estimates that Swifties spend an average of $40 per head at her concert on merch — that adds up to about $175 million in gross merch sales last year. Swift’s camp keeps the majority of that.
Bloomberg estimated that between box office and merchandise, Swift pocketed $225 million, pre-tax, from her first 57 Eras tour dates. Career earnings from ticket sales and merchandise account for 34% of her total net worth, while earnings from music streaming and sales account for 18%, Bloomberg estimates.
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Swift isn’t alone in making money on the road.
In 2021, the last year Billboard made a list of music’s top earners, seven out of the 10 top money makers earned more than half of their income from touring.
But the music industry didn’t always function this way. Before the advent of streaming, musicians made most of their fortune selling CDs, cassette tapes, and vinyl records.
“Physical music sales made up the bulk of artists’ revenue pre-streaming, and that revenue was what enabled artists to tour. These days, the equation has flipped,” Tatiana Cirisano, senior music industry analyst at MIDiA, told BI over email.
Streaming made listening to recorded music much cheaper. For less than the price of one CD — or for free, illegally, or with ads — people could get all the songs they wanted.
“The moment Napster hit, it changed the paradigm, and it really honestly diluted the value of music,” Durant said.
To be sure, Swift is still making tens of millions, if not more, on streaming and record sales each year — more than almost any other artist on the planet.
Streaming services like Spotify pay out artists on a pro-rata model: There is a pot, made up of subscription and ad revenue, paid out to artists each year. Those with the biggest share of the platform’s total streams get the biggest piece of it.
But “if you’re an individual artist, you have to have a pretty massive audience to be able to earn a meaningful share of that revenue — which is paid out to you after your label gets its cut,” Cirisano said.
Last year, Swift was the most-streamed artist on both Apple and Spotify. One of every 78 songs streamed in the US last year was a Swift song, according to music data firm Luminate. She will likely rank at or near the top again, between “The Tortured Poets Department” and a streaming lift from the second leg of her Eras tour.
Swift will also earn more than most artists from physical music sales. Last year, she was responsible for one out of every 15 vinyl records sold, according to Luminate. Her rabid followers see physical records as “a symbol of fandom,” Cirisano said, and a way to support Swift.
That said, without Eras, Swift would just be a poor centimillionaire.