How Taylor Swift went from struggling to sell out two nights at Croke Park to world domination

UNLESS YOU’RE GARTH Brooks, selling out Croke Park is a daunting challenge.

Nobody knows this better than Taylor Swift, or at least, the arm of the Taylor Swift machine responsible for putting together her 2018 Reputation Stadium Tour.

Such has been the inescapability of Swift over the last several years, it seems almost unthinkable that there could have ever been a summer when Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2023 could have failed to sell out two nights at the 82,000-seater GAA Headquarters – no matter how mammoth a task that may sound to us mere mortals. This summer, the singer sold out three nights at the Aviva Stadium (capacity: 51,700).  One gets the sense that if Swift had announced another show, and another show, and another show, the only thing stopping her from selling those out would have been a Brooksesque campaign of concerned Ballsbridge residents.

In 2018, though, it was a different story. The official total attendance for Swift’s Dublin concerts that June was just over 133,000, around 29,000 spaces shy of the stadium’s capacity over two nights and over 22,000 shy of the number of tickets she sold this time around in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. The 2018 shows never sold out, and that was in spite of every radio station, mobile network and Facebook page in the country running competitions where just about every entrant seemed to come away with four tickets to the Reputation Tour.

Indeed, reports from 2018 suggest that fans who had paid full-price for tickets to see Swift were outraged to learn that they could have gone for free had they simply waited long enough for the singer’s team to realise that the venue was at risk of being under-filled in a way that could have harmed Swift’s, well, her reputation.

Swift was not some unknown artist back in 2018. Reputation (the album) had sold two million copies worldwide within one week of its release, making Swift the first artist to have four albums go platinum in their first week since such records began. Swift did not run into similar ticket sales issues on the rest of the tour which, by its end, was the highest grossing US tour in history at the time.

Speaking to The Journal ahead of Swift’s return to Ireland, journalist, DJ and Playlist Creator at Apple Music Louise Bruton offered a few explanations for why the Dublin leg of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is so far-removed from 2018.

“I hate the word ‘Era,’ but the Reputation Era was really about people not liking Taylor Swift,” Bruton points out. It was the first album that saw Swift lean hard into certain controversies, such as her spat with the rapper Kanye West, who had targeted the singer in the lyrics of his track ‘Famous’.

Swift’s relationship with Calvin Harris had also ended in acrimony at the time, with Harris at one point accusing the singer of damaging his reputation. A backlash against Swift formed, culminating in regular tweetstorms around the hashtag “#TaylorSwiftIsOverParty,” which resulted in the singer scaling back her social media presence before the 2019 release of her album Lover, which remains her second-worst performing album in terms of sales.

Bruton ascribes to the idea that Swift’s popularity reached a different level with the release of her 2020 album Folklore and its sibling record Evermore, both of which came out in the latter-half of 2020 when people all over the world were desperate for anything that felt like an event. Swift duly delivered.

“Those albums stripped back all of the celebrity and channeled her efforts into properly interesting songwriting and people were very impressed by it. Her ‘Taylor’s Version’ albums have also contributed to her chart dominance, and people like that she’s reclaiming her music.” This refers to Swift’s rerecorded versions of her early albums, the masters of which were owned by Big Machine Records, the label Swift left in 2018.

Fast-forward six years and Swift has sold out three nights at the Aviva within a matter of minutes. Thousands more fans, if not tens of thousands, came away disappointed and empty-handed from Ticketmaster’s digital queue.

While much of the change can be attributed to the Swift’s ever-increasing domination of the zeitgeist – her own folklore, so to speak – it is worth noting that there have been other, more structural changes that have contributed.

“The hierarchy of ticket pricing wasn’t as severe then,” Bruton says, referring to the . “Demand for tickets seems far more extreme now because people are no longer able to get cheaper tickets. Tickets are more like gold-dust now.” Ticketmaster’s incredibly convoluted sale process for the Eras Tour turned the very act of buying a ticket into an event, where fans needed to sign up for a code to even be in with a chance to get a ticket.

Bruton, who was in attendance for Swift’s 2018 gig, said the stadium felt “very full and very lively” thanks to a very committed group of fans.

“She had last played Ireland in the 3Arena on the 1989 tour (in 2015), so maybe two nights in Croke Park was too big a leap. She was really, really popular, but maybe less so in Ireland specifically.”

The Eras Tour, however, is an entirely different beast. Already the highest-grossing tour in the history of music, the tour has become a phenomenon unto itself, transcending songs and albums and offering fan the God’s eye view of Swift’s discography, career and life.

“What she’s doing differently giving us a greatest hits concert, playing directly to what fans want: to hear their favourite song,” says Bruton. “It’s really good when you compare it with other touring popstars where fans are very familiar with the setlist… It makes fans feel like she cares, though if she really cared she’d probably price her tickets differently.”

Pricing is a common concern among those who think that Swift’s monopoly on popular culture has gone too far. Swift has faced increasing criticism for her use of a private jet, her perceived reticence on several major social injustices, and her unending pursuit of parting her fans with their money through a relentless march of albums, re-releases, deluxe versions and VIP packages.

“I think that’s a general shift in culture. People have approached events differently since Covid,” Bruton says. “Concerts are no longer just about buying tickets but buying into the entire brand.”

Bruton points to the 2023 summer phenomenon that was Barbie, and the ancillary culture that developed around it, and says that has “bled into” the frenzy around the Eras Tour and the cultural touchstones that have accompanied it. Take for example the trend of bracelet swapping, where fans make individualised friendship bracelets and swap them with their fellow Swifties at concerts. In that sense, the Eras Tour is as much about community and identity as much as it is about having a dance.

Concerts are no longer just concerts but landmark life events, the fear of missing out replaced by something more akin to a sense of existential peril.

Perhaps this makes sense in a society that was deprived of such occasions for the guts of two years while Covid wreaked its havoc. It’s harder to tolerate the FOMO now that we’ve had a vision of a world where missing out on something might mean you never get the chance to do it again. Swift has shrewdly capitalised upon this idea of unmissability by performing two surprise acoustic songs at every Eras Tour show thereby making every show ‘different,’ sort of like The Grateful Dead if they’d had the GDP of a small Oceanic island.

It may not have gone to plan in 2018, but anyone in the vicinity of the Aviva this week will bear witness to the mania that now follows Swift wherever she goes. No matter your feelings on the singer, her reputation precedes her now.