Taylor Swift's Midnight breaking records, moving more than one million units in a week, and she did it in three day. Full Taylor takeover.
The phenomenon that is Tyler Swift. Another record. Taylor Swift's Eras Tour is.
On track to become the highest grossing tour of all time.
Welcome to the Aeros Tour. Taylor Swift has been a megastar for years now, but these days the pop singer is absolutely unavoidable. Oh her hit songs, her record breaking Eras concert tour, and a new blockbuster movie, not to mention her approachable, down to earth persona. Have won heard tens of millions of diehard fans.
People come up to me and they'd be like, you're you gonna just like do a show with like all the albums in it, And I was like, Yeah, it's gonna be called the Aeros Tour. See you there.
Bloomberg's Devin Pendleton and Claire Ballentine report that Swift has also made astute business decisions and has a high tolerance for taking risks. As a result. At age thirty three, she's now reached a new milestone billionaire.
Never really have I ever seen an entertainer. So an athlete or a musician or an actor really become a billionaire based on their art alone. She's actually really done it based on her music, and that's extraordinary and very difficult to do.
It was all by design, because I'm a master of mine.
I'm West Kasova today on the Big Take The Business of being Taylor Swift. Devin Claire, Obviously this was like the summer of Taylor Swift. But Devin, why did you want to go find out how much she's worth?
Taylor was everywhere this summer. She's been around for a while, but all of a sudden, she was just this incredibly epic moment. I don't think in my lifetime I've ever been as close to living in a monoculture as this summer. And of course, you know, as living I tabulate how much people are worth, So of course we're all curious. I'm thinking, like, how much is she made from this? She's got to be a billionaire, And no, didn't seem
like anyone had declared she was a billionaire. But surely the Era's tour, which is just this mega hit this summer, has pushed her over the edge. So we got to crunching some numbers and turned out that the Taylor Swift economy universe was incredibly vast and way more complex than I had any idea.
And I remember when we first started this project, didn't you initially think she was almost a billionaire but not quite so? Then it was really fun as the reporting went on to see, oh, she's crossed that.
Mart Yeah, And it was exactly that, like the Aras tour. We started out I think as a placeholder saying Taylor Swift high nine figures and then all of a sudden thinking, oh my gosh, no, she's done it. Like ring the gong, we're here, and.
I really like to get into all the different things that combine to really push her over the top. But you also write that for a musician, even when as fabulously successful as she is, reaching a billion dollars is not easy and pretty unusual.
Yes, it really is. And I've been covering billionaires and super rich people for sixteen years and never really have I ever seen an entertainer, so an athlete, or a musician or a actor really become a billionaire based on their art alone. Like when they have done it, it's usually been because of a business venture, a terrific fragrance steel or dine, a property branding thing. But she's actually really done it based on her music, and that's extraordinary and very difficult to do.
Claire, we started talking about the Era's Tour, which is the thing I think people are most aware of right now, just how big was Eras for Taylor Swift.
So the arastur came about post pandemic. There was so much demand for concerts, and during the pandemic when everything was shut down, she released four albums in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one and then came out with a brand new album, Midnight's Last Year, and she really capitalized on this moment where people had this demand for live music.
And you know, she could have done this tour for just her most recent albums, for you know, the ones that hadn't gotten the whole you know, Rollout and a world not under lockdown, but instead she sort of chose to make this a celebration of her entire catalog and career, and that sort of created this huge cultural moment that we saw this summer.
Not only did she have all these co but these concerts were in stadiums, massive stadiums like football stadiums, and that is also remarkable because she packed these stadiums. I mean, they were all sold out, and it's really just a tiny kind of sliver of musicians who can fill a stadium. It's kind of like this very elite group of people.
People were paying so much money to go to these concerts. It was unbelievable.
Yeah, So the shows were two hundred and fifty four dollars on average, but many people paid so much more than that. Because of the resale market, there's obviously tiered seating, so I mean, sky's the limit. I don't know exactly who paid the most, but in tens of thousands of dollars easily.
And I thought one thing that she did that was so smart in these tours is so she had the list of songs that she would play at each show, and of course the fans quickly picked up on that and it was published, you know, the set list, but at each show she had us prize song or a couple of surprise songs, and that could be anything from
her entire catalog of music. And so I thought that was so smart because it added this element of surprise to each show, and you know, I've heard people talking about, you know, the different concerts that they went to this summer, and the thing that people ask is they were like, what was your surprise song?
So, Devin, when you add it all up, what was this giant spectacle of the Era's tour really worth?
We estimated that so far the tours brought in over seven hundred million dollars. That is based just on ticket sales. That doesn't include merch, that doesn't include soft pretzels and wings and all those other things that people buy at the concert. That's really just based on ticket sales, based on the average price of two hundred and fifty four dollars, and.
So the actual value, sort of the knock on economic effect is actually a whole lot larger than that.
Yeah, Bloomberg Economics estimates that just this North American lego, the tour contributed four point three billion dollars to GDP, which is tremendous. We saw hotel revenues at some of these cities just go through the roof, you know, going out to restaurants when they're traveling. It was a big
item for summer travel this year. You saw a lot of the cities that really were seeing huge benefits of her being there, and they wanted her there and were able just to capitalize on that to really boost their local economies.
And one of the things you write which really stood out was this idea that it caused such an economic ripple wherever it went that the Federal Reserve started watching these sales as an economic indicator.
Yeah. I think that for them, it was a pretty notable point that so many people had the money to pay for these tickets. It's pretty incredible that people would
have enough money to go out and do that. It was a sign of the consumer strength, and I think that's what they were really looking for this summer, you know, Taylor and in addition Beyonce and of course there's the Barbe movie and Oppenheimer and some of these major blockbusters that people were going out and spending on the summer, and it really showed that people just felt secure enough in their economic situations to go out and spend money on these tours.
Devin, the Era's tour was kind of the big center piece of traction that I think a lot of people see. But you also write that behind the scenes, Taylor Swift has been very savvy at building a business around her persona, her music, and like the whole Taylor Swift ecosystem is really what also drives this increase in her wealth she has.
Where we are looking backwards, you can really see how savvy she's been from a pretty young age. I guess one of the sort of watershed moments would be back in twenty fifteen. I think it was Spotify was picking up a lot of traction, was where most people returning to to get their music, Spotify and other streaming services, and she yanked all of her music off of it in protest of what she said was unfair compensation, saying, basically, this is my art. You're not putting a proper value on my art.
She tells Yahoo Music this morning. Spotify felt like an experiment, and she's not willing to contribute her life's work to an experiment. She says, I try to really remain open minded about things because I do think it's important to be a part of progress. But I think it's really up for debate whether Spotify is actual progress.
And she kind of had the power to do that, and her fans were very happy to see her music out elsewhere. It was off for a number of years I think she went back on in twenty seventeen. Yeah, yeah, And we don't know the terms of the deal, of course, that she negotiated Spotify when she came back on, but you can only surmise that she struck a better deal.
That would say was sort of a notable thing for one, because obviously it probably worked out monetarily for her in the end, but also you kind of shine a light on this disproportion in the music industry between these streamers kind of using their power to be the place where musicians, if they want to get hurt and want to attract new listeners, they really have to put their music there.
And yet they're paid a tiny, tiny, you know, fraction of a penny per stream It's really not that much money if you're not a huge star like a Taylor Swift. So she kind of was like positioning herself as an ally of musicians at large.
And this is a really important point because it used to be that musicians would make a lot of their money from selling albums and then capes and then CDs, but now it really is performing much more than streaming or the sales of the actual music itself that drives a musician's.
Profits, yes, exactly, which is tough. I mean, I think about it. A viral musician, maybe I don't want a tour that sounds really grueling, but if you really want to make a lot of money, like you have to be out performing because that's where the margin is.
And yet you write that she's one of the few musicians who is able to make money selling physical copies of music when almost everybody else has just gone kind of to digital.
Yeah, she's been able to sort of capitalize on that fan base and has positioned a lot of her albums and her record sales as this collector's item, and that's pretty unique. I mean you're seeing, you know, records that are sold out because she's advertised them to her fans, and they view it as this sort of badge of honor to have a physical copy of her music, not just streaming it online.
And music analyst I was talking to telling me she even sells CDs. I mean, lots of musicians today, they of course they still make physical music, they still put out final they still put out CDs, but the difference is Tailor's really selling them, and she probably is producing much bigger quantities because they're going to move. I think that's maybe some of her demographic is so young that it's as like cool and retro as a record, a vinyl record to some people. I don't know how they play it.
But when we come back Taylor Swift's fight to take back control of her music. The other really big thing that Taylor Swift did that you write about was to take back control of her own music catalog.
Yeah. So how it works in music is often when an artist signs with a record label, it's kind of an artist for higher deal. Typically, as they say yes, this record label is going to produce an album for the artist. In return, they give the artist a big chunk of money and the record label gets to keep what they call usually the masters writes to the music, which is the copyright to the actual music recording, the actual music that they make, the songs that go on
an album the record label keeps. So that means if the songs are played in the future in a public setting, or if they're used in a commercial, or if they're streamed on Spotify, they get a good, healthy royalty stream down the road. So that was the deal Taylor Swift had for her first six albums. It was for a record label called Big Machine, which is based in Nashville, and they really kind of took a chance on her.
I mean, she was fourteen years old when she signed with them, and she was with them for six years, and then she laughed. She basically went independent and the record label was sold. The record label's biggest asset by far was the masters to Taylor Swift's albums, and then ultimately a few years later, Taylor Swift's masters itself was sold again. And there was some drama to these sales because it involved a former manager of hers she had
a tricky relationship with. But it meant that Taylor Swift didn't have control of her masters. She basically didn't own that music essentially anymore. She did have some rights to it because she wrote the songs, but she didn't have like the big meaty, really valuable rights that are known
as the masters. And she really was very public about how upset she was that she lost control of these rights, that it was her music and it was really hard to see it sold twice, and that she said she did not have an opportunity to buy those rights even though she wanted to. That was really what she wanted more than anything else. So she said what she was going to do was re record all of those albums and re record them so that she would own the rights. Now, now, could you re record?
Oh yeah, might you do that?
Oh yeah, that's a plan.
Yeah, absolutely, And that was a really bold thing to do. First of all, it's very hard to like re record a song and make it sound exactly like the original, especially when you consider like she's thirty three now, she was a teenager when she did some of these songs. Also, I mean, it's risky. It basically means that, yes, she's going to have the masters, but there's another version of these songs out there, So how valuable are her master's going to be? And that's kind of like where the
power of Taylor's fan base comes in. So she's four albums in of the sixth total she's going to do, and she's calling these new versions parentheses Taylor's version, And it's not hard to imagine and that the fans, her millions and millions of passionate fans, they want to listen to Taylor's version because Taylor's done a really good job of vilifying how it all went down with her first six albums.
Taylor Swift keeps on making music history. Her latest album, Speak Now. Taylor's Version debut at number one on Billboard's Album charts this week. No big surprise here, right. That gives her four albums in the top ten at the same time.
It's like Beatles ask.
It's pretty amazing.
Yeah, and Claire, a lot of these millions and millions of passionate fans were buying Taylor's version also owned the original version, so she's getting double the sales on some of these albums.
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty incredible, you know. And she's not just re recording the initial albums like an identical version. She's also adding some of these songs that were cut, So in some cases she's adding ten or more additional songs that people haven't heard before to each album. So it's almost like you're getting a better version of these albums that you loved from you know, ten years ago, and you're also getting new music from that era that
you hadn't heard before. In addition to that, obviously she's used you know, records and other merch and there are all these accessories you can get with the release of a new re recording and the fan base of course just will buy anything that she puts out.
And Devin, when you had all that up, do we know what her new Taylor's Version albums are Ashley worth?
So it's conjecture for sure, Like everything, you know, that's a private asset. But we have some interesting comparable transactions to look at because it's been more common in the past few years for musicians to sell their catalogs. Their catalogs basically rights to their music that they own, so they're going to have a piece to their music rights and they've been selling it. So we've seen Bruce Springsteen sold his catalog for five hundred and fifty million dollars
a couple of years ago. Just a couple of weeks ago, Katie Perry sold hers for a reported two hundred and twenty five million dollars. So what would Taylor Swifts be worth? So we'd have to kind of look at her full body of work and know that for the Taylor's Version, there's kind of a duplicate set out there floating around,
which is going to dilute slightly. But I think that Dilutioni's going to become, you know, almost not a thing in the future because Taylor's version is going to dominate, and she also has the albums that she recorded after she left Big Machine, including Midnights and some others. So altogether, I mean we got to range. Some people said it could be worth up to a billion dollars her catalog, like at the most sort of bullish. Other people said
or like, you know, four hundred five hundred million. So I think four hundred five hundred million is what we went for with for our official net worth analysis, with sort of the caveat that it could be worth much more. And one of the reasons that it could be worth much more is that Taylor Swift a has just this huge passionate fan base who are going to follow her through her career. And b Taylor Swift is thirty three,
she has so much to mean. She's calling this tour her eras tour, but I mean, there's so many more eras to come.
It's funny whenever you know there's a report of a Taylor Swift breakup or a new relationship, all the fans just are thinking, oh, yeah, we've got lots of albums to come from this. She'll take inspiration from this breakup and you know, with her new relationship with NFL star Travis Kelcey, all the fans are thinking, oh, yeah, we're going to get new music from this era as well, Yeah, some material.
You're right that just the attention of that new relationship has also had huge sales effects.
Yeah, so we saw just you know, this rumored relationship between the two really drive interest in NFL games. There was a twenty two percent increase in total audience that the NFL saw just because people wanted to watch and for a glimpse of Taylor. So it just really showed her ability to drive consumer behavior and how people really will flock to whatever she is doing, even if it's football.
You know, you saw more women have at least a surface level interest in what was going on with these games. Sales of his jersey increased four hundred percent because people were suddenly you know, interested in that aspect because of his relationship with Taylor. So it was pretty remarkable, and I will say the NFL really did capitalize on that too.
I Mean, they were showing her constantly in some of these games, and you know, I think they realize as well that you know, this is a way for them to boost their audience too, so it sort of was a mutually beneficial partnership between the two of them.
After the break the inner workings of Taylor Swift, Inc. Devin, how do you go about trying to evaluate Taylor Swift's Well, there's some stuff that's public, but a lot of the stuff isn't public.
So we came up with an estimate of one point one billion dollars. But I cannot stress enough that that is a conservative estimate because we try not to make too many assumptions when we're doing these networth estimates, and so you have to start with Taylor Swift is you have to think about earnings because of course she's raking in money from streaming and from concert ticket sales and
from music sales. So some of that information's public. I mean, we know average ticket price, we know how many tickets she's sold, how many tours she's done, because this is her sixth tour. I believe you basically just have to add up all that money. We also have to factor in she's paying taxes. We have to factor in she pays her team, her agents or attorneys. And then of course there are some pieces we approach more like a
private asset. Her real estate is quite significant. She's built up that and we can definitely put a value on that, and also the music catalog, which is an increasingly really important discrete asset for musicians. So there was the exercise of trying to figure out how much would someone pay for that if she were to sell. It is a small, i think, tightly managed, little organization, but it's i'd say,
very serious about what it does. So one interesting thing is that she has it looks like a number of LLC's.
It seems to be ten, and we think it's ten because her father, Scott Swift, is a longtime registered investment advisor with Merrill Lynch and he started in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, which is where Taylor Swift was from the family moved to Nashville, and we've seen in these filings from the Securities Exchange Commission, which if you're a registered investment advisor you have to file with them that her dad also helps oversee ten LLC's which are affiliated with different parts
of her business or holdings. Some of these LLC's oversea properties she owns. She has some really lovely properties in Beverly Hills and in Rhode Island. All together, they're worth one hundred and ten million dollars. One of them manages to private jets, one of them owns an airplane hangar.
One of them, which I think is a very important, owns merchandising business, and obviously merchandising such an important part of her business that brings in a huge amount of revenue at these concerts and then also just through her own website. He also helps oversee a copyright related business. We don't have a lot of visibility into that, but she has all of these really catchy, famous lyrics. They are known to kind of police the use of these lyrics and songs quite rigorously, and.
I think it really just speaks to how she's kept it very in house. I mean, she's had her dad really helped drive this. It also speaks to she's obviously worked very hard for her career and has been tremendously successful. But you know, she didn't start from absolutely nowhere. She did have a little guidance on the way, and I think that really set the foundation for her to be
so lucrative later on. You know, we've seen a lot of musicians have MISSEDEPS, but because it's so tightly controlled, and I think she had her dad to advise her on a lot of these things that sort of helped build the basis for this, you know, hugely profitable career later on.
And another thing you write about is that she's not just selling things to her fans, selling music, It's that she has developed this way of speaking to them directly through social media and other platforms in a way that previous big artists were not able to do.
Yeah, so Taylor Swift is a digital native. I mean she grew up in a time where communicating on the internet through social media was completely normal and it's what you did. Being you know, a little bit confessional was a very normal and appropriate way to engage with people. And she has done a great job kind of finding a voice that has really spoken to her fans, that treads this line between being private enough but also open
and seeming like a friend. And I think that's really like ingrained her into the hearts of so many people.
You know, it was just this is incredible, successful and talented artists, but who also feels like someone I could know and someone whose relationships I know, and I hear about her heartache and I know about her backstory and that has been really powerful and unique, Like you can't really imagine Michael Jackson having that relationship with his fans are definitely not Madonna, you know, really different kind of megastar fan relationship.
I mean, I think she's tremendously relatable in a lot of ways. I mean, we've seen her catalog her relationships and breakups and all of these songs since she was sixteen, and people feel like they've grown up with her through these various life events that she's gone through and then written about in her songs so transparently. So people really do feel like they know her, which of course can bet a ble edged sword, you know, people think they know a lot about her life, and who knows what's
actually true and what's not. But regardless, people really do feel like they have this inside look into her life and what she's going through, and that just makes her so much more relatable to them.
And it's also sort of like a treasure hunt aspect to it too, Like she has like clues what does she call them.
Easter eggs? Easter eggs, Ye, yes, she has Easter eggs of when she's releasing albums and things like that, she'll put a little Easter egg in, like maybe a photo she posts on Instagram, And you know, people have theories that are probably ludicrous and just how elaborate they are, but she definitely does purposely put some hints in her social media timeline of things to come that she's going to release or do well.
Speaking of things to come, what is next for Taylor Swift? Where does she go from here?
Writing the story, I kind of felt like we were writing about someone sort of at the peak, like how could it get crazier? But then she goes and releases this movie, The Era's Concert Tour Movie, which in its opening weekend did ninety two point eight million dollars in sales, by far, the biggest concert movie ever, And so she was kind of allowing, after all this buzz, all of us poor people who didn't get to see it now
have a chance to go watch it. We could watch it again and again, and even people who did go to the concert are buying tickets because this movie is a front row seat, so it's a totally different vantage point. And I think she's just caught a really long career ahead of her, and we've already seen this really interesting transformation from country to pop country to really pop star, so you know, she could take it in all sorts of really different directions going forward.
And Claire, the Eiris tour itself now is going on the road again.
Yeah, she has a whole international leg of the tour coming up and you know, likely going to do tremendous ticket sales and merg sales there. So she has a lot to go in terms of profits coming up just from this upcoming leg of her tour.
And I know at least one person who's going to be seeing her in tour overseas.
Yes, I'm actually going to France to see her. My friend was able to get us tickets at a more reasonable price than we could in the US, so it's going to be really fun. And also I think to shows. You know, I'm not the only person doing this. People are traveling distances to see her shows internationally, so she does have a lot to come just with this tour.
Take me with you, Devin Claire, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you, thank you, thanks for listening to us here at the Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot Net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Virgolino. Our
senior producer is Catherine Fink. Our producers are Michael Falero and Moberra. Hil de Garcia is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm Wes Kasova. We'll be back on Monday with another Big Take. Every great weekend, the people better