TAYLOR SWIFT’S NEW ALBUM, The Tortured Poets Department, is not one of her best. Critics have complained about its exhausting length (31 songs, two hours), subdued tone and lyrical wound-rubbing. Her decision to announce it at the Grammy awards, months before its release on 19 April, was widely seen as tacky, snatching the media spotlight from other winners.
For any other artist, this might be a perilous moment of bubble-bursting hubris, but 34-year-old Taylor Alison Swift is not any other artist. The album set a streaming record on Spotify – 300m in one day and 1bn in five – and made her the first artist in history to secure the top 14 spots on the Billboard Hot 100. In the US, it sold 2.6m copies in the first week, second only to Adele’s 3.4m nine years ago, with 859,000 on vinyl alone.
Swift is a formidable singer-songwriter, but these days she is as likely to feature in the business pages as the music pages. Last October, off the back of the first leg of her Eras tour, she was declared a billionaire – the first person to pass that milestone through music-related earnings alone rather than other investments. Eras became the first billion-dollar tour in history, selling 2.4m tickets in a single day. Forbes estimated she was earning $10m-$13m a night. And the tour movie is the highest grossing of all time, at $262m.
“The Eras tour turned out to be a juggernaut that even she couldn’t have anticipated,” says Carl Wilson, pop critic for Slate. “I can’t remember another phenomenon like it in live music.”
As the tour made its way across North America, local economies boomed, with fans spending an average of $1,325, including travel, accommodation, food and drink. The UK leg is predicted to boost the economy by £1bn ($1.27bn), while Singapore outbid rival nations
