Where the Money From Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, Projected to Make $590M+, Goes

There are 170,000 tickets left for Taylor Swift’s upcoming Eras tour, which has 52 dates across the U.S. as of now. The tickets that have been sold have generated an estimated $591 million, according to Billboard. While ticket prices have wildly fluctuated, their average price clocks in at $215.

Swift will likely take the fourth place in the all-time Top Tours chart and become the official highest-grossing female touring artist of all time, beating out Madonna whose 2008 and 2009 Sticky & Sweet Tour brought in $407 million.

That is a lot of money, and more of it will be going to Swift than is usual for artists as she won’t be paying out to a booking agency — independent promoter Louis Messina booked the tour and is covering those responsibilities. The musical artist also held Ticketmaster and SeatGeek to different standards, not allowing them to sell secondary market tickets. She demanded they sell tickets to fans and not scalpers, reducing the number of tickets on resale sites by 75 percent.

That means they’ll be receiving less money, though by the time those remaining 170,000 tickets are sold, the companies will have made between $9 million and $12.9 million. This windfall comes after a ticket roll out that confused and frustrated fans who were offered ticket prices as high as 10k a piece, left waiting in line, and in some cases charged multiple times without receiving a ticket.

On November 18, Swift addressed the controversy in a message to her fans on an Instagram Story.

“Well. It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” she began. “We’ve been doing this for decades together and over the years, I’ve brought so many elements of my career in house. I’ve done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do. It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”

Aimée Lutkin is the weekend editor at ELLE.com. Her writing has appeared in Jezebel, Glamour, Marie Claire and more. Her first book, The Lonely Hunter, will be released by Dial Press in February 2022.