Taylor Swift ended her nearly two-year-long tour on Dec. 8. The Eras Tour broke records as one of the highest-grossing tours in history.
Andrew Mall has long attended Hardcore Festival as part of his research on music festivals.
But this year, he noticed something different happening: People were handing out friendship bracelets.
Friendship bracelets, while not a new concept, have become associated with Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Fans began handing them out when the tour began, a nod to a line — “so make the friendship bracelets/take the moment and taste it” — from a track on her then-new album “Midnights.”
“It’s spilling outside of Taylor Swift fandom,” said Mall, an associate professor of music at Northeastern University. “The expressions of fandom that we saw at the Eras Tour. … I’m seeing that at other shows. More and more fans are engaging with that aspect of celebrity culture and what it means to be a fan. … People are handing out friendship bracelets for hardcore bands. This was not part of the scene a year ago, but it’s super cool that people are doing it now.”
The bracelets are just one of many cultural marks left behind by the nearly two-year tour that broke ticket sale records, inspired a Senate hearing into Ticketmaster, led to a movie and a book, and reached millions of fans around the globe.
“There are tours that have been longer and … there have been tours that have reached more people,” Mall said. “But there haven’t been any tours that have been so engaging, so impactful and so economically impactful.”
The Eras Tour was Swift’s first time touring since 2018. Between 2018 and the start of the Eras Tour in 2023, she released four albums and two rerecordings of old albums.
Rather than simply focus on her new music, Swift used the Eras Tour to highlight her different “eras” and performed songs from all 11 of her studio albums, an unusual move from a mid-career artist.
Not many musicians are able to take a tour highlighting all their work, instead needing to focus on selling their new music or else risk isolating a fan base by performing parts of their catalog newer fans might not know. But Swift, Mall said, is a rare exception.
“(She has) a magnificent catalog. It’s huge and in a lot of ways is really diverse,” Mall added. “The thing about the Taylor Swift fan base is that they know so much of the catalog. Different levels of Taylor’s fandom have an opportunity of different eras. I’m not sure many other artists could pull that off.”
The tour spanned 21 months, from March 2023 to December 2024. It went on for 632 days, 50 cities, and five continents. Swift sold over $2 billion in tickets across the 149 shows — double the record gross sales for any other tour in history. And this number doesn’t include merchandise sales, ticket resales, and the income fans brought to the cities where the shows happened.
And the impact goes beyond the dollars and cents. The demand for tickets led to a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company. The Justice Department later filed an antitrust suit against Live Nation, calling for the company to break up.
With such a presence, the tour developed its own “culture” with rituals such as trading friendship bracelets with different lyrics spelled out on them. It was common for attendees to wear costumes — whether it be wearing the T-shirt from the 22 music video or the “Evermore” album cover flannel — or channel different eras by wearing correlating styles and colors. Those who couldn’t attend would watch live streams, often provided by some indulgent fellow fans.
Then there were rituals perpetuated by Swift herself: During each show, she would give the hat she wore during one number to a lucky fan. And to close out each show, she would perform different “surprise” songs from her catalog that were not part of the show’s setlist, giving each audience a different experience. There were also surprise guest appearances.
This is not the only way she mixed it up: In addition to re-releasing two of her old albums with new “vault” tracks over the course of the tour, Swift dropped an entirely new album, “The Tortured Poets’ Department,” in the midst of the Eras Tour. She then added in a new segment to the show to highlight it, something Mall said is unusual for a tour this size.
“Tours that are this big in terms of their production, they’re pretty much the same,” he continued. “The Eras Tour has had surprises in most concerts. Then halfway through the tour, (“The Tortured Poets’ Department”) comes out and she incorporates that into the tour. Artists who have done global, two-year-long tours really don’t integrate a new component to it partway through.”
So what’s next for Swift? Many are waiting for her to announce her next move (or the release of her latest re-recording). But Mall said he hopes she takes time to rest.
“What’s next for her is probably a left turn,” he said. “She hibernates for 18 months or disappears into her relationship or her house and then emerges with something entirely new. What I hope she does is take time to rejuvenate and focus on not being a business person.”