Taylor Swift performing in Chicago on 2 June. Photograph: Natasha Moustache/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights
Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, whose three-hour, career-spanning shows have made it a huge critical and commercial success in the US, is to arrive in the UK and Europe.
The tour encompasses 26 stadium dates, beginning 9 May 2024 in Paris, followed by gigs in Stockholm, Madrid, Lisbon and Lyon.
The UK leg then begins on 7 June with two dates in Edinburgh, followed by two in Liverpool, one in Cardiff, and two in London’s Wembley Stadium.
Dublin, Amsterdam, Zurich, Milan, Gelsenkirchen, Hamburg, Munich, Warsaw and Vienna follow, with two further Wembley Stadium dates closing the tour on 16 and 17 August. Registration for tickets is now open.
Eras is Swift’s first world tour since 2018, since when she has released four new studio albums. After 2019’s lovestruck pop album Lover, she spent the years when touring plans were disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic writing and recording a pair of more intimate, folksy records: Folklore and Evermore, both released in 2020. Midnights followed in 2022 and turned back towards pop, with songs rendered in pulsating synth-focused productions.
The tour has been acclaimed for its use of three stages made of digital display units, allowing Swift to execute eye-catching tricks such as appearing to dive into a swimming pool and emerge in an entirely new outfit.
Billboard has estimated gross ticket revenue from the US tour to be $591m, though that figure is based on average ticket prices – in an era of “dynamic pricing” by ticket companies, where what fans pay can change depending on demand, such estimates could easily fluctuate.
Ticketmaster saw enormous demand for the US tour, with 2.4m tickets sold in a single day: a new record. But the company was unprepared for the number of fans for the pre-sale period, and had to cancel a public sale of tickets, leading to a fan group suing the company. Swift said she was “pissed off” with Ticketmaster and the company apologised. But the fiasco led to debates in the US Congress over whether Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation hold too great a share of the live music marketplace.
A message regarding the UK and Europe tour warns hopeful fans: “Registration does not guarantee access to the sale or to tickets.”
Some who do definitely qualify are those who were incentivised to buy Midnights from Swift’s own store, which ensured they had future access to the tour pre-sale – the tactic helped Midnights become the fastest-selling album of 2022, beating Arctic Monkeys to No 1 in a fierce chart battle.
In a five-star review of the tour’s opening night in Glendale, Arizona, on 17 March, the Guardian’s Adrian Horton described it as “indisputably epic … in sheer scope of songs and devotion to lyrics, no artist can match her”. Regarding Swift’s notoriously intense fans, she wrote: “such intensity, courted by Swift with notorious Easter egging and rewarding, can be eyeroll-inducing. But when viewed from inside the Swiftieverse, in a deafening stadium she comfortably commanded for over three hours, it is rapturous.”
