How the Beyoncé Bump Affected Sweden

American singer Beyoncé’s latest album, Cowboy Carter, spent several weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 album charts after its release in late March. Together with Taylor Swift, Beyoncé has earned the status of being one of the United States’ biggest pop stars. But various economic dimensions of that stardom often go unnoticed.

What is the “Beyoncé bump,” in macroeconomic terms? What does Beyoncé’s album reveal about the relationship between America’s Black and white economies? And how has her approach to activism changed over time?

Those are a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast that we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: Swedish policymakers have referred to the macroeconomic effects that Beyoncé’s 2023 tour caused in the country, including an uptick in inflation. Apparently, that’s also evident in the local economies of the United States whenever her tour passes through town. How does this so-called Beyoncé bump work in practice?

Adam Tooze: Yes, it really is [evident]. It’s an extraordinary turn of events. But basically, as far as I understand it, her world tour started in Stockholm in May 2023, and she was there for two nights, and they sold out all 46,000 tickets available each night. And Stockholm is a lovely city, but it has limited hotel supply and Airbnb supply. And so the prices of those and restaurant meals and everything else that goes with a great night out just went through the roof.

Think of it as a kind of reverse COVID-19 effect, where everyone stops going out and the prices for all of those services fell. In this case, everyone wants to have a good time, to go and see a great show. And so, faced with limited supply, prices surge. You would expect people after that, having blown their fun budget for the year or the month,  to then pull back, and so you would expect this to be a temporary effect. Except that—and this is the fascinating thing—except that the Swedish central bank is in fact one of the last central banks globally to raise interest rates. And so they are pursuing a relatively accommodative monetary policy. Their interest rates are, relatively speaking, lower. And the Swedish krona is relatively lower.

And so part of the Beyoncé bump story actually has a macroeconomic dimension, which is that the Swedish krona is undervalued. So if you are an affluent Beyoncé fan and fancy seeing her somewhere other than Vegas, for instance, Stockholm all of a sudden turns out to be a great place to go, because translated into dollars, the tickets go for between $60 and $140. It’s a steal, right? So there’s a macroeconomic effect that is compounding the simple supply side story of there not being enough hotel rooms. Whereas, you know, the standard tickets on Ticketmaster for her Vegas show vary from $91 to $689.

And there are many U.S. cities where the resale price is in the multiples of that. So you’re seeing a macroeconomic effect—in other words, the maladjustment of interest rates, the relatively higher inflation rate, the relatively lower value of the Swedish krona compounding, producing a global effect where, as it were, thousands of fans from the rest of the world flocked to Stockholm to see this. And it’s not simply a demand and supply story locally. You would expect this surge in prices ultimately to ebb away.

CA: This latest album of Beyoncé’s, Cowboy Carter, as the name suggests, is a country album, which is a shift in genre for Beyoncé in what had otherwise ostensibly been considered a white genre. How separate or intertangled are white and Black economies today in the United States, both in terms of culture and generally?

AT: Well, many U.S. cities in particular are still highly segregated. And northeastern cities, New York and Boston and so on, are among the most severely segregated in terms of residential areas, where people live, and the local economies that go with that. There are completely different structures of retail and food deserts in many majority Black neighborhoods across the United States’ cities. The median household wealth of Black Americans is as little as $24,000. By comparison, the median white household has assets of $189,000. So that’s $164,000 difference. That implies some really stark differences between what you’re calling Black and white economies.

If you go to the average rather than the median, the wealth gap is even huger. It’s like $840,000, which reflects the fact that extremely affluent people such as Beyoncé and Jay-Z are much rarer in the Black community in the United States than in the white community.

But in the music business, it’s a bit different, right? Because when we say that she’s crossing over to a largely white segment—like country—we shouldn’t imagine that that means that somehow that Beyoncé is finally accessing the great uplands of white music demand. Because the segment that she is the queen of, R&B, hip-hop, and so on, is by far and away by any metric the biggest segment in the music business. Depends on which particular streaming mechanism that you monitor. But broadly speaking, you’re not too far off if you say its share of overall music revenue flow is about 25 percent. And no other genre comes close. In albums, old school albums, rock music still features. And in the purchase of streamed songs, country is a little bit further ahead. But in every other respect, R&B dominates country by a factor of 2 to 1.

Which, given the fact that the Black population is a relatively small minority of the total population of the United States, about half that music share tells you that she’s already crossed over to white America on a gigantic scale, right? This country move, I think, is a sort of, “I can do anything” kind of a move. As she said about the album, “This ain’t a country album, this is a Beyoncé album.” I’m just making an album any way I like, and I can, because I am who I am. I am this multitalented, fabulous, extraordinary performer, and talent, and also brand. And so, she can break this.

CA: Beyoncé is also a kind of icon of activism: social activism, feminist activism, and, broadly speaking, in those ways, economic activism. But I’m curious whether her career also shows the malleability of the content of feminist or social activism. Her image has changed multiple times over the years, from a proud underdog figure, to an unembarrassed material success, to a scorned lover, to occasionally even a nostalgic for past tough times that she’s overcome. What does this reveal about what it means to be empowered, to use that activist term?

AT: Yeah. The more I thought about this, the more kind of hilariously inappropriate I thought it was for me to comment. But let me give it a shot anyway. I mean, you know, if you take the outlines of her biography—which was all news to me, but it was totally fascinating—her great-great-great-grandmother was a slave. Her great-great-grandmother was the Creole mistress of a white plantation boss. Her dad was a graduate of Fisk University in Alabama, an up-and-coming Xerox salesman, and her mother was a multitalented performer who, you know, ran a hair salon in prosperous Houston, Texas. And if you look online, and I have, you know, Beyoncé’s family home, she lived in a beautiful house, as far as I’m able to tell, in the Third Ward of Houston. So really, what looks like an extremely prosperous neighborhood.

She herself then starts as like an extremely highly trained, as far as I can tell, talent show contestant. And then, as you say, she becomes one of the world’s wealthiest self-made women with an estimated net worth of $800 million and counting. But what I think is very interesting, and this I really found fascinating, was the trajectory in terms of her overt politics. Because it’s really after 2008, really in the 2010s, that she moves toward making much more explicit political statements, and it reveals a kind of relationship between Black pop culture and politics in the United States that I had only sort of dimly sensed.

I didn’t know that the phrase “woke” actually was put into general circulation not by Beyoncé, but by Erykah Badu, the R&B luminary, more of an outside artist figure than Beyoncé, who had this song “Master Teacher” that was released on the extraordinarily politically named New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) album that was released in 2008. And she coins this phrase, “I’m known to stay awake. A beautiful world I’m trying to find. Even though you go through struggle and strife to keep a healthy life, I stay woke, I stay woke.” And that becomes the kind of mantra. And apparently it goes back to a moment in a Spike Lee film where he says, “Wake up,” right? And it’s the School Daze film.

But if you look at Beyoncé’s history, she embraces feminism overtly in 2014. There’s an appearance where she has a kind of feminist and “I am a feminist” as the central statement of her position, which opens up that term, which is so heavily freighted for many American women, especially perhaps Black American women, as a moment of something that they, too, can struggle with and think through and make their own. Then in 2016, she has an appearance with the Dixie Chicks at the Country Music Association Awards, which matters because the Chicks, in the country scene, were the girl group that challenged former U.S. President George W. Bush over the 2003 Iraq War and faced a lot of backlash for that.

Then in her 2016 Super Bowl appearance, Beyoncé makes all of these Black Panther references. And Beyoncé supports presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016. And then in 2017, following on the football theme, she’s one of the most prominent backers of the exiled ex-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has this campaign of taking a knee in honor of the Black Lives Matter movement, which became hugely contentious.