With Eras Tour book, Taylor Swift offers up a holiday surprise
Summary
The singer announced on Tuesday that she’s releasing a 256-page book commemorating the highest-grossing concert tour of all time.Taylor Swift is closing the biggest chapter of her career—her mammoth “Eras Tour," which began in March 2023 and ends in December—with a 256-page book.The pop singer on Tuesday announced an Eras Tour retrospective tome, “The Official Eras Tour Book," putting a bow on what’s become the highest-grossing concert tour of all time. The new hardcover coffee-table book will include personal reflections written by Swift and more than 500 images, including exclusive performance and backstage shots. In addition, Swift is releasing vinyl and CD editions of “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology," the expanded version of her latest album. Both will be available exclusively via Target on Nov. 29.The new merchandise comes as Swift returns to the U.S. to complete the final leg of her Eras Tour, the first concert trek to generate over $1 billion in ticket revenue. Having taken a two-month breather after a European run, Swift performs at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium on Friday, followed by engagements in New Orleans and Indianapolis, finishing her tour—after more than a year and a half—in Vancouver on Dec. 8.
Swift is ending the tour by delivering products that will likely serve as holiday gifts. The new merchandise shows her continuing to find ways to monetize the Eras Tour, having already released a film capturing it. She’s also publishing the book herself, via Taylor Swift Publications, instead of going with a traditional publisher.
In making these moves, she’s giving herself a rest: Swift has churned out eight major albums (including rerecords) in the 2020s—a burst of commercial output that contrasts sharply with her behavior earlier in her career when she released albums less frequently.Fans speculated that Swift might kick off her post-tour phase by dropping the potentially next installment of her re-recordings project: a “Taylor’s Version" edition of her 2017 album, “Reputation." Others hoped she might pad her Eras Tour with a few additional dates. (There were also hopes for an Eras Tour live album.)
“Taylor Swift has entered her novelist era," jokes Nate Sloan, co-host of “Switched on Pop," a podcast about pop music. “Swift is hardly the first pop star to flog a tour book. Madonna, Janet Jackson and many others established that particular play decades ago," he says. “Still, the role of the book in the contemporary music industry is far different than it was even 20 years ago. In a time of digital ephemera, fans crave something physical."Music fans routinely complain about the dearth of huge cultural events shared by everyone in the digital age—but Swift’s Eras Tour has been exactly that, a monocultural moment on par with Michael Jackson’s heyday in the 1980s or even the Beatles in the 1960s. Besides fueling a mania among fans, who, among other things, single-handedly revived friendship bracelets and inspired the Gannett newspaper chain to hire a Taylor Swift reporter, the Eras Tour has been an economic juggernaut, injecting stimulus into cities in the U.S. and abroad via hotel reservations, plane tickets, restaurants and other kinds of consumer spending.“As long as there are ‘superfans,’ there will be a certain percentage of an artist-following that will find a way to purchase any item an artist offers—almost regardless of price," says Bill Werde, director of the Bandier music-business program at Syracuse University and author of the industry newsletter Full Rate No Cap.
Write to Neil Shah at Neil.Shah@wsj.com
