Taylor Swift Eras Tour Photo Shows Huge Line for Merch
Taylor Swift performs at Friends Arena on May 17, 2024 in Stockholm, Sweden. Fans waited a long time to get their hands on merchandise in Portugal.
Taylor Swift fans have once again shown they are willing to put in the hard yards to support their favorite singer.
The "Bad Blood" songstress, 34, is completing the European leg of her sold-out Eras world tour.
A photo taken in Lisbon, Portugal, showed a long line of people at a merchandise stand by the arena where she was performing waiting to get their hands on the official Swift swag.
According to a Portuguese Swift fan account on X, the merch stand opened at around midday and the long queue had already formed prior to it opening up.
Fans replied to the post with concern, some asking whether there was a limit on how much people could buy, with others writing that they hoped there would not be such a big line when they were attending upcoming shows.
The long wait to get Swift merchandise isn't unprecedented as her fans are known to spend on average around $1,300 to see the Eras tour, and that's not including the price of the tickets.
In the U.S., Eras tickets ranged from $49 to $499 (plus fees) per StyleCaster. But many fans could only get their tickets on resale sites such as StubHub, where the average cost was $1,089 per CNBC, but some sold for for up to $11,000, and even more.
Swifties—the name of her fan base—then need to spend money on travel, food, shopping, accommodation and Eras merchandise. They contributed an additional $1,300 on average to local economies where they were attending the show, and as such the Eras tour contributed about $6 billion to the U.S. economy in 2023 alone.
One fan told Fortune that she "felt pressure to buy more and more merch each time there is something new, particularly when it's presented as a limited edition."
But there was a psychological phenomenon behind wanting to get their hands on as many Swift goodies as possible.
"[Fandoms are] hierarchical structures in which fans have their status elevated by participating in certain ways," Georgia Carroll, a sociology Ph.D who graduated from the University of Sydney, wrote in The Conversation. "For Swift fans, these hierarchies are heavily tied to practices of consumption, including the purchasing of concert tickets.
"Within the fandom, fans who travel to shows, attend multiple nights, or have seats near the stage are labelled 'dedicated' and 'committed'... The higher the levels of sacrifice reported, the more someone can project to other members of the fandom just how big a fan they are."
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