Taylor Swift is officially a billionaire, largely fuelled by her all-conquering Eras tour, according to Bloomberg.
The pop singer now has a net worth of $1.1 billion, making her one of the few entertainers to reach the milestone through music alone, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index found.
Swift, 33, embarked on the Eras tour in March and it is expected to gross well over $1 billion, beating a record set by Sir Elton John.
The tour’s 53 American concerts have added $4.3 billion to the country’s gross domestic product, according to estimates from Bloomberg Economics. The tour film has dominated the American box office since its release two weeks ago.
Meanwhile 1989 (Taylor’s Version), a re-recording of a nine-year-old album that was released on Friday, is expected to be one of the top-selling records of the year.
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Swift began remaking her old material following a row over her master recordings when it emerged that the rights to her first six albums had been sold without her knowledge.
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The singer has since released four of the remade albums, each with “from the vault” tracks that were not included on the original record.
Experts say Swift’s success is attributed not only to the quality of her music but through her canny marketing and the bond she has with her millions of mostly female fans.
“In addition to being a generational talent, Taylor Swift is a great economist,” Carolyn Sloane, an economist at the University of Chicago, told Bloomberg.
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“Taylor has great ideas, is able to scale her ideas and seems to be pretty risk-seeking.”
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Swift released her eponymous debut album in 2006 before embarking on one of the most successful critical and commercial runs in the history of pop music.
During the pandemic she released two acclaimed albums, Folklore and Evermore, while Midnights topped charts around the world when it arrived last year.
She has won the Grammy for album of the year three times, a record she holds with Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon.
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Swift’s packed back catalogue powers the Eras tour. The show runs for more than three hours and is a journey through her career.
Bloomberg said its estimates of Swift’s wealth were conservative. Its calculations were based on the estimated value of her music catalogue, five homes and earnings from music sales, concert tickets, streaming deals and merchandise.
The music Swift has released since 2019 — the year she signed a new record deal that gave her the rights to her master recordings — is worth about $400 million, Bloomberg said. She is estimated to have made $370 million from ticket sales and merchandise and $120 milion from streaming her music. Her homes, including properties in Los Angeles, New York and Rhode Island, are worth an estimated $110 million.
Swift still has almost 90 shows to go on the Eras tour, with dates scheduled around the world, including in the UK.
Some analysts have speculated that her eventual target is to gross more than $2 billion on the tour, a figure that would dwarf the roughly $939 million made by Sir Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, which ended in July and which currently holds the record.
