Sinead O’Sullivan: Megastar Taylor Swift personifies the new economy – my HBS lecture
Taylor Swift's influence transcends music, disrupting industries like streaming, antitrust, and live events. Her Eras Tour broke records, filling stadiums and sparking Senate hearings over Ticketmaster's dominance. With her re-recorded albums reclaiming rights and fans' unwavering devotion, Swift proves she's not just an artist but an unparalleled cultural and economic force.
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By Sinead O'Sullivan
$36 billion?
Stripe's valuation in 2021.
SpaceX's valuation in 2020.
The amount Meta spent on trying to build the Metaverse.
The amount Gautam Adani lost in a single day in 2023.
The amount Elon Musk gained in a single day in 2021.
But most importantly, it's also the number of times Taylor Swift's music has been streamed globally.
As I sat in a crowd of over 70,000 people at Swift's Era's tour in Gillette Stadium in Boston, only one thing crossed my mind: "there has never been a single product made by a single brand that has been so successful. Ever. Period."
As her life on tour fills the front pages of gossip magazines and the clothes she wears adds to the voluminous reports about her on Vogue, you gotta wonder- why are people so distracted by who she's not dating instead of the fact that she has single handedly turned an entire industry on its head?
Swift's $266 million sixth concert tour is, without a doubt, the most unprecedented tour ever created, with her US leg alone covering 52 dates in 20 cities.
Consider that on each of these nights, she fills the stadium with double the number of people who attended this year's Berkshire Hathaway Annual meeting. And that's just on the inside of the stadium. The same number of (ticketless) fans will congregate in parking lots on the outside of the stadium, hoping just to be near the venue where Swift might stand. Night after night.
Breaking all sorts of records, 3.5 million people registered with Ticketmaster's presale program, and the website crashed as soon as the presale opened last November. While I did not win "the presale lottery" to even be allowed the small chance of getting such a ticket, I teamed up with others to make sure that, statistically speaking, one of us did. Thank god for those long hours that I dedicated to PhD level statistics. Eight hours of mental breakdowns, page refreshes, and more 404 Ticketmaster errors worth thinking about later, we had two tickets for Boston at $150 each. But the Ticketmaster Chaos
, an event in its own right, did not go unnoticed as the wrath of Taylor left executives quivering.
When you consider that former US Attorney General Robert Bork spent his entire life dedicated to attempting US antitrust reform, it's impressive that Taylor Swift managed to trigger a US Senate antitrust hearing within the same month as the Ticketmaster Chaos
. A lack of competition between ticketing platforms, she said, was evidenced by the inability of the dominant ticketing platform to manage her ticket sales.
Is Taylor Swift the new… Lina Khan?
However, Ticketmaster has since said that "it's you, hi, you're the problem, it's you" to Taylor; the problem is not that Ticketmaster is too big, but that Taylor Swift is. The demand for the pre-sale tickets alone "could fill 900 stadiums".
Nine. Hundred. Stadiums.
On the day of my concert, I could have sold my ticket for a 1,900% Return on Investment, annualized at 105,744%. The only other returns profile that even closely matches this is for those who bought Amazon stock at its IPO in 1997 and sold at its 2021 peak.
Is Taylor Swift the new… Jeff Bezos?
Ok, but money aside, there's something else that's harder to put a price on. Do you know what it feels like to be with 70,000 people who have all spent weeks and months and like myself even years trying to get tickets? Who have listened to hundreds of thousands of hours of Swift's music? Who have painstakingly spent hours and even weeks curating outfits and even making their own hand-stitched, identical replicas of Swift's red carpet looks?
To see hundreds of state troopers directing traffic with arms full of friendship bracelets they've been given by fans? To see mounted police units on horses with glitter? To see helicopters circling the stadium for days on end, watching thousands of diehard fans screaming and crying at the top of their lungs for hours on end during the only performance that will ever matter in their lifetimes?
The value of the Swift brand goodwill has to be in the order of billions of dollars.
In fact, the only comparable to the Era's tour I can come up with is Pope Francis' celebration of World Youth Day on Brazil's Copacabana Beach in 2015, which drew in an estimated 5 million people. Yet demand for her Era shows is three times higher.
Is Taylor Swift the new… Pope?
And let's not forget about the day Taylor Swift got really mad, "cause there's nothing like a mad woman", and decided to upend the $26 billion music streaming rights industry. She did what every woman has wanted to do forever, and gave the PE bros at Carlyle a big FU. That is, before massacring the $300m deal to sell her music catalog to Shamrock Capital investment fund. Oh, and re-recording her catalog, drastically reducing the royalty revenues and the value of the Carlyle deal.
Unaware of Swift's ability to disrupt an industry overnight, the Carlyle group CEO said with the false conviction of every finance bro I've ever met: "I've got every confidence in the world that it's going to turn out to be a successful investment." Hmm… a bro with much to learn.
Is Taylor Swift the next… Bill Ackman?
No. She's not Lina Khan, or Jeff Bezos, or the Pope, or Bill Ackman, or even Matty Healy's girlfriend. She's the 800 pound gorilla that could easily out maneuver them all. She's the wolf in sheep's (very nice, Vogue-like) clothing. And I, for one, am here for it.
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