This hunger for live music has been spurred on by two headline-dominating 2023 tours. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is projected to be the highest earning ever – at more than $2bn – with resale tickets going for an average of $1,600 (SeatGeek, 2023). The impact of the tour has been much reported on (a phenomenon dubbed “Swiftonomics”), with huge influxes of visitors boosting local economies via hotel stays and restaurant trips. Meanwhile, Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour has also been a wild success, bringing in more than $579m (Live Nation, 2023).
The pull of these milestone events has been seismic, generating unprecedented excitement extending across social media (#ErasTour has more than 29 billion views on TikTok; #RenaissanceWorldTour has 5.3 billion), boosted by concert movies from both artists. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour took a record-breaking $97m in its opening weekend in the US, beating eminent director Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, while Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé brought in more than $21m on release – the first time in 20 years a movie released on the weekend after Thanksgiving has cracked $20m.
This enthusiasm for live culture (and connected entertainment) isn’t only due to the particular appeal of Swift and Beyoncé among young fans: American Gen Zers attended an average of 24 live events in 2023 – 10 more than the average working consumer (The Harris Poll, 2023). In the US, admissions to spectator events, including live entertainment and sports games, reached $99bn in Q3 2023 – up about $20bn year-on-year (BEA, 2023).
As we’ve outlined in Pop Culture & Media Futures 23/24, 2024 will see a growing wave of exciting developments and audience appetite for live culture, turbocharged by technological innovation and thriving fan-led social media buzz machines.
For more, see Immersive Art: New Opportunities in Experiential Pop Culture and Boundary-Pushing Performance.