Taylor Swift achieves Guinness World Record for highest-grossing music tour ever
We still have a few weeks left before welcoming the New Year, but Taylor Swift is still not yet finished conquering 2023. This time, she broke a Guinness World Record for the highest-grossing music tour ever.
The singer-songwriter achieved this with her recently-concluded Eras tour, which kicked off in March earlier this year and ended on Dec. 8 for a total of 151 shows across five continents.
Coming on the heels of her 10th studio album Midnights, the tour is described to be a journey through all of Taylor's musical "eras" and is an homage to her albums. With a set list of 44 songs divided into 10 acts, each show lasts up to three and a half hours.
According to Pollstar, a trade publication for the concert industry, Taylor's music tour was the first to surpass $1.04 billion (P55.8 billion) in revenue.
It was enough to beat the record set by Elton John’s five-year farewell tour that raked in $939 million (P52.4 billion) over 328 shows. It also surpassed the earnings of this year's other two high-grossing music tours from Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen combined.
Guinness World Records states that an estimated number of 72,000 people are in attendance for each concert. As the tickets have an average price of $238 (P13,282), each show earns over $17 million (P948 million).
The concert's immense impact even made headlines in the news several times, such as when fans had caused earthquake-like seismic activity at certain shows, as happened in Seattle in July.
Aside from the successful tour, Taylor has had other notable achievements this year, such as when she was named Time Magazine's Person of the Year and being among Forbes' list of 100 Most Powerful Women of 2023. She also dropped the re-recording of her fifth studio album 1989 in October, which became her biggest release ever.
The film version of Taylor's Eras tour will be available for streaming starting Dec. 13, which is also her 34th birthday. At this time, it is only available to watch in the US, Canada, and the UK.