Taylor Swift performs onstage during the Eras Tour at Lincoln Financial Field on May 12, 2023 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Lisa Lake/Getty Images
The stunning success of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour has had a noticeable impact on the economy.The Federal Reserve highlighted the impact of Swift’s three Philadelphia concerts in its most recent beige book. Hotel revenues in the city surged to their highest level since the pandemic, thanks to Swift.
Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, which consists of 131 concerts across 17 states and 5 continents, has caught the attention of the Federal Reserve due to its noticeable impact on local economies.
The tour, which has attracted hundreds of thousands of Taylor Swift fans to cities across the country, helped boost hotel revenues considerably in Philadelphia.
“Despite the slowing recovery in tourism in the region overall, one contact highlighted that May was the strongest month for hotel revenue in Philadelphia since the onset of the pandemic, in large part due to an influx of guests for the Taylor Swift concerts in the city,” the Fed said in its most recent Beige Book.
Swift performed three concerts at Lincoln Financial Field on May 12, 13, and 14, and she returned to Pennsylvania in mid-June to perform in Pittsburgh.
According to data from Booking.com, hotel prices more than tripled in anticipation of the tour in some cities, including in Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and Kansas City. The hotel occupancy rate in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, approached 100% during the Swift tour and hotel reservation platforms crashed due to a surge in web traffic.
This weekend, Swift’s tour is set to hit Denver, Colorado, and one estimate from the Common Sense Institute suggests the concert will generate $140 million for the state’s gross domestic product. The city expects about 75,000 Swift fans to attend each of the two sold-out concerts, and the report said it could lead to more than $200 million in direct consumer spending.
To truly understand the scale of Swift’s upcoming Denver concerts this weekend, the report highlighted that the two Eras shows will generate an estimated $38 million in ticket sales, which is equivalent to 63% of the famed Red Rock’s venues’ total ticket sales in 2022.
“The totality of Taylor Swifts’ U.S. tour could generate $4.6 billion in total consumer spending, larger than the GDP of 35 countries,” the Common Sense Institute said.
So if the economy manages to avoid a recession that so many are worried about, the US may have Taylor Swift and her deeply loyal fans partly to thank.