The Power of TikTok on a Tour
TikTok’s impact on the music industry cannot be overstated. It’s created hits and cemented stars out of the artists that make them. And if you’ve amassed a catalog of songs, the platform is even more beneficial, because nothing trends on TikTok like a tour.
No one knows this better than Taylor Swift, whose Eras Tour catapulted her into a stratosphere of stardom unseen since Michael Jackson moonwalked across the stage at the Motown 25 show 40 years ago.
The success of Her Swiftness seems preordained now, but just a few years ago she was struggling to keep up with her contemporaries.
In 2020 when TikTok was taking off, Taylor wasn’t the singular artist topping the trending list, but rather Harry Styles. That year, the British pop star filled TikTok for You Pages across the globe with over 7 billion views, almost four times what Taylor had over the same period.
But a raw deal turned into a golden opportunity.
Taylor’s TikTok fortunes turned around when she began to re-record her music. Each release was a middle finger to the man and only served to ignite the passions of Swifties across the globe.
When she released the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” in November 2021, interest in the empress of sound skyrocketed. In two days, views on TikTok content related to Taylor jumped from a previous high of 80M to over 260M as her fans discussed the new lyrics and tried to uncover the easter eggs in the short film she directed starring Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien.
Taylor topped that daily views number with 331M less than one year later when she released “Midnights” (Oct. 21, 2022), her tenth studio album.
Having released new music and re-introduced the world to her classics, #SwiftTok was primed to pop when she announced her latest tour on Instagram 10 days later.
The Eras Tour promised to chronicle Swift’s career from up-and-coming country singer to bonafide superstar, and it didn’t disappoint. The tour launched on March 17th in Glendale, AZ with a whopping 3-hour+ performance that included 44 songs, 15 backup dancers, 13 costume changes, and 1 crashed ticketing site.
Night after night, Taylor gave her fans the concert of a lifetime, and in return, they’ve given her the best marketing vehicle for a tour a musician has ever seen.
Since the first date of The Eras Tour, Swifties have flooded TikTok with 1.9M videos and flocked to view them; Taylor content has averaged 380M views per day with no one day going under 200M.
As a point of comparison, content related to Beyoncé has averaged 90M views per day since the start of her Renaissance Tour (May 10, 2023) and only two days have surpassed 200M views.
No disrespect to the BeyHive. Those numbers are phenomenal and only underscore the unprecedented power of Taylor Swift to move markets.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the disparity in views between Bey and Tay on TikTok mirrors the difference in resale prices for tickets to the Renaissance and Eras tours ($1,096 to $3,801), and could give an indication for what we can expect from the box office of their concert films.
Right now, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” Concert Film is expected to open to $100-125M at the domestic box office, making it the highest grossing concert film of all time and one of the biggest openings of the year.
If TikTok views predict box office, Beyoncé stands to have a massive opening of her own at $25 million-$35 million when “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé” is released later this year.
Of course, if the Swifties have taught us anything, it’s to respect their influence. I wouldn’t put it past them to push Taylor past the other blonde at the top of the box office.
Jared Naylor is vice president of Audience Development at Vobile, a digital content protection software and analytics provider for the world’s largest entertainment companies, sports leagues and publishers. In his role, Naylor helps media companies maximize the value of their IP across the largest social platforms.
