Taylor Swift’s Sold-Out Concerts Take Tokyo by Storm, Super Bowl Return in the Spotlight
By Jessie Yeung, Hanako Montgomery and Junko Ogura, CNN
Tokyo (CNN) — Long lines in snowy weather to buy merchandise days in advance. Hordes of fans, some from other countries, filling up the 55,000-seat Tokyo Dome. People around the world feverishly calculating time zones and watching online flight trackers.
This is the Taylor Swift phenomenon – and the mania that has followed the pop superstar as she prepares to perform four nights of sold-out shows in Tokyo before jetting back to Las Vegas to watch boyfriend Travis Kelce play at the Super Bowl with the Kansas City Chiefs.
“What we’ve seen with the Taylor Swift tour is something that we’ve not really seen before,” said Richard Clarke, an analyst at investment firm Bernstein. “It’s been a very well-timed post-Covid event, a sort of cultural event, everyone seems to want to go to this.”
Swift’s Tokyo leg of her Eras Tour – a multi-continent extravaganza that could end up as the highest-grossing tour of all time – kicks off Wednesday evening and ends Saturday night. But excitement among Swifties, as her fans are known, began days ahead of her arrival.
On Monday, organizers began selling tour merchandise at the Tokyo Dome, with large crowds waiting outdoors in the snow and sleet for Taylor-branded hoodies and sweatshirts. One fan from the Philippines, who flew to Tokyo for the concert, said on TikTok she’d stood in line in temperatures hovering around zero for two and a half hours.
Fans have also spent days, if not weeks, preparing through rituals that have by now become established traditions among the Swiftie community: making personalized friendship bracelets to trade with other concert attendees, practicing crowd chants and curating carefully chosen Taylor-themed outfits.
Kane Ishiyone, 28, has loved Swift since 2009 – to the point she learned English to understand the song lyrics. After Swift announced her Eras Tour, which had its first show in March 2023 and will continue through December 2024, Ishiyone quit her job so she could move about more freely and attend more Eras concerts.
This week, she traveled from her home in Fukuoka, in southwestern Japan, to Tokyo for the concert – for which she has bought tickets to all four nights. She, like many fans, has planned four different outfits for each night, corresponding to certain albums or “eras” by Swift.
To date, she has attended more than 20 concerts in eight cities – and is already planning future trips to Germany, Austria and the Netherlands to attend Swift’s shows there.
“It’s been such a popular tour that people have found that their home markets are often sold out, and therefore have begun to travel to other markets to try and find tickets,” said Clarke. “I’m sure that’s going to be the case with Asia as well.”
The Taylor Swift economy
Swift’s stardom holds such outsized power that experts say she may single-handedly boost Japan’s entire economy in just four days.
Up to 34.1 billion yen (about $229.6 million) are expected to be generated from Swift’s concerts, said Mitsumasa Etou, a representative of research site Economic Effects NET, and a part-time lecturer at Tokyo City University.
He called the tour Japan’s biggest ever musical event in terms of predicted economic impact – expected to surpass Fuji Rock, one of Japan’s biggest music festivals, which last year generated about 20 billion yen (about $134.6 million) in revenue.
The estimated numbers for Swift’s tour don’t even include the impact of international tourists coming to Japan for the show, he said.
Clarke agreed, saying: “If you add up the ticket prices, the restaurants … she was, on her own, a fairly significant impact on regional GDP.” Besides the tickets and travel cost, attendees are likely also eating out at restaurants, shopping for goods and making other purchases, meaning “there’s going to be more taxes being used,” he said.
Part of the reason it’s so profitable is just how much Swift’s tickets cost. Prices for seats close to the stage are now double what they’d cost in 2018 when she performed at the Tokyo Dome for her Reputation tour, said Etou.
Not to mention, many superfans like Ishiyone bought tickets for multiple shows. 28-year-old Maiko Akazawa, who grew up listening to Swift’s music, bought tickets for all four nights in the VIP section for 46,000 yen (about $309) total.
Clarke cautioned that the economic impact will be milder in a metropolis like Tokyo – which has many hotels and thus can easily accommodate an influx of fans – than smaller cities. Some US towns saw up to 95% revenue increases for the nights of Swift’s concerts – whereas Tokyo will likely see an increase of about 25% each night, he said.
The difference is that people might be traveling much further for the Tokyo shows, as it’s one of only three locations she will visit in the Asia Pacific region. She will play six shows in Singapore – with tickets for those selling out within hours – and seven shows in Australia later in February.
“You will have some people that definitely will be like, ‘Well, look, I haven’t been able to get tickets in Los Angeles. It’s not that much different to go to Tokyo than it is to go to the East Coast,” said Clarke.
Australia is already bracing itself for impact, more than a week out from her scheduled concert. On Tuesday, Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Michele Bullock said the “Taylor Swift inflation” effect has forced fans to adjust their spending elsewhere to afford tour tickets and other related costs, according to Reuters.
Reuters added that the tour is the first in history to gross over $1 billion, citing industry estimates – with fans spending billions more dollars on transportation and accommodation.
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