The Summer I Turned Swiftie

Historians may recall this as the Summer of the Indictment, but those of us living through this era of Eras know that it’s really the Summer of Taylor Swift. The Eras Tour has already become the highest grossing music tour of all time—though no else one in the top ten can match Ed Sheeran’s one-man, one-guitar, profitability. But the Swift tour is about more than just money. Swift has somehow unified a massive audience in a divided time of segmented audiences. She changes local economies, she alters traffic reports, and she has achieved “a level of white-hot demand and media saturation not seen since the 1980s heyday of Michael Jackson and Madonna — a dominance that the entertainment business had largely accepted as impossible to replicate in the fragmented 21st century. ‘The only thing I can compare it to is the phenomenon of Beatlemania,’ said Billy Joel, who attended Swift’s show in Tampa, Fla., with his wife and young daughters.” NYT (Gift Article): How Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Conquered the World.

+ She broke Ticketmaster. But that was just the beginning. NYT (Gift Article): Taylor Swift’s Viral Era.

+ So let’s remember that this hasn’t just been a Summer of politics, even if politicians across the country have tried really hard to make the Swift tour about them. The Taylor Swift Official State Sandwich: Politicians understand that Swifties are a key demographic. (Thanks, but I’ll stick with Taylor’s version…)