Swiftonomics

It's good news... let's talk about it rationally and positively

The Taylor Swift phenomenon has landed in the UK bringing with it a fantastic wave of enthusiasm for live music which is a joy for anyone who believes in the power of creativity and culture. Let me be 100% clear on this; you can count me in as one of the people who are absolutely delighted. Listening to the people in the queue on BBC Radio 5 Live recently, I was struck by exactly how much we, as a live music community, desperately need artists like Taylor to engage a whole new generation of music fans. To anyone gritting their teeth at the huge amount of love pouring in her direction, which she has more than earned thorough her creative choices, her philanthropy, her attitude towards her fans and her band and crew, a simple message: You don’t have to like everything before you can acknowledge that’s it’s a good thing. The world doesn’t have to be precisely designed to perfectly match your own personal taste before things that artists are doing have inherent positive merits.

With the arrival of the Eras Tour in the UK has come the headlines we have seen everywhere else in the world; the impact of Swiftonomics. This is a special brand of economic analysis which purports to show the impact of Taylor arriving in any single location.

Depending on which news source you go to, the dates that make up the British leg of the Eras Tour will add somewhere between £900 million and £1.2 billion to the UK economy. Either would be a truly impressive amount, but where are these numbers coming from and what do they actually mean? When journalists repost the Swiftonomics claims of ‘value added to the economy’ what exactly are they describing? How are they quantifying it, and exactly who do they perceive is benefiting from this remarkable boost in spending?

Tracking back from the majority of these media stories, it appears that the original source for much of the press coverage started on 15 May 2024 with a press release by Barclaycard. Hinging their interest on their dominance of the UK credit card market, in which Barclaycard hold a 40% stake, their press release hails the astonishing boost to the UK’s finances using the following maths:

• Total capacity of all UK Eras Tour venues: 1,175,470

• Average expected spending by each individual fan attending UK Eras Tour concerts: £848.30

• Total expected spending across all UK tour dates (1,175,470 x £848.30) = £997,151,201

Having asserted an average spend of £848.30 per person attending, which includes such items as the amount spent on accommodation (£121 per person), travel (£111 per person) and ‘new clothing’ (£56 per person), the original release comes with a special note of the amount that each attendee is predicted to spend on glitter. Putting aside the quite astonishing predicted total spend per person, which, if it is true, would be a hugely good news story for the live music industry, and for the wider economy, there is, nonetheless, a challenging aspect to the way that Barclaycard have chosen to present this narrative.

The light touch analysis used to create the numbers results in the assumption that all the spend is new and additional; that none if it would have happened if it was not for the arrival of the main attraction. To put that as starkly as possible, this ‘boost to the UK economy’ is based on the concept that if Taylor Swift was not playing, 1,175,470 people wouldn’t eat that day. It goes on to assume that they would not buy new clothes around the date of the show, would not choose to travel anywhere during the period that the show is taking place, wouldn’t stay anywhere, wouldn’t drink anything, simply would not spend this money in any other way. For the glitter based economy, that may be very true. For everyone else, it seems tremendously unlikely. In short, Barclaycard’s claim of ‘new and additional spending’ is, at best, an inflated, simplistic, and misguided description of what is commonly known as ‘displaced spending’.

Economic displacement describes spending by attendees on an event that would have been spent elsewhere in the economy if the event had not occurred. To that end, it is not ‘new and additional’, nor is it a boost to the national economy that experiences it. The Eras Tour is certainly moving money into Edinburgh, Liverpool, Cardiff and London, but that money is largely being displaced from other parts of the UK, or, importantly, from other parts of the music economy. It is certainly creating huge income for the promoters, ticket companies, agencies, and the artist herself, but how much of that income’s final destination is London, Liverpool, Cardiff or Edinburgh? How much of it is boosting the UK economy, and how much is hitting the economies of the countries that provide those services - in Taylor’s case, largely the USA.

None of this is absolutist. I’m not here to argue that Taylor Swift bringing her shows to the UK isn’t a huge positive for music fans, and for the cities and regional economies chosen to host the shows. It is no more correct to say that Taylor Swift is having no positive impact on the economy of the UK than it is to claim that the Eras Tour has boosted spend in the hospitality sector by ‘over £1 billion’. It is certainly true that some countries have experienced an influx of overseas visitors to attend these event, although whether this will be true for the UK (which has some of the highest entrance prices for this tour anywhere in the world, due, in part, to the highest rates of VAT and Premises Taxes in the world) remains to be seen. Taylor certainly boosts economies, that can be taken as read. Does the impact of her shows in the UK create £1billion in extra spend as Barclaycard claimed, and then all mainstream media outlets repeated?

This may seem like an odd thing for me to be writing about, in a Substack that usually focuses exclusively on the challenges faced by grassroots venues, artists and promoters. But this is one ecosystem, whether that’s the UK economy or the music economy. When a single part of that ecosystem creates a demand, to take Barclaycard’s numbers at face value, of £1 billion it must, no matter how much some journalists would like to tell us otherwise, have a negative impact on other parts of that ecosystem. Anecdotally, we can already evidence this as being the case; while Murrayfield was packed with fans, independent music businesses in the city of Edinburgh reported their quietest week of the year. The music industry’s favourite economist Will Page claimed that people who attend these big shows are all new consumers who would not be going to any other events. He didn’t provide any evidence for this, he just said it was his opinion and based on likely reality. And yet there is data and evidence which plainly shows that the massive increase in the number of large scale events at premium prices tracks directly to a decline in live music opportunities in our local communities. And that’s happening everywhere in the world, concurrently, to every music ecosystem experiencing it, without exception. Perhaps it’s an astonishing coincidence, eh Will?

Why does this matter? When stories like the ‘Swiftonomic miracle’ take hold, we see national and local governments following those stories and acting to be part of them. It was revealed in a recent IQ Magazine article that Mayors and local governments around the world are offering financial enticements to bring Taylor to their city, to tap into the Swiftonomics phenomenon. These are, all too frequently, the same cities that are not financially investing in the musical talent they have in their own local community.

A failure to consider the whole ecosystem, and how everyone might benefit from the incredible success Swift has created, ultimately risks a failing ecosystem.  Common Patterns of Ecosystem Breakdown under Stress (Rapport, Whitford & Hildén, 1998) describes the stresses which place Ecosystems at risk. Over-harvesting is one of the principal risks which cause the transformation of systems from healthy states to unhealthy states.

There is some genuinely new and additional money being created by the Eras Tour that is incredibly important and we should acknowledge as one of the most significant benefits, both now and in the future, of her stunning global success. That additional money, brand new spend that would not otherwise have occurred, is happening in music retail. More than one shop owning friend tells me that sales of acoustic guitars are significantly up, and the principle new market they are seeing is young people who are inspired to think they want to learn to play an instrument and express themselves through music by the example Taylor Swift is setting.

Inspiring young people to think of themselves as potential musicians is, irrespective of arguments about ‘new’, ‘additional’, or ‘displaced’, a huge potential boost for the future of the live music economy. But we will be failing those young people, and ourselves, if we let that newfound aspiration go to waste because there is simply nowhere left in their local community they can take their new guitars and perform in public for the very first time. Cities and national governments need to approach the fantastic opportunity Taylor is creating through her work and her art with a coherent, thoughtful, dynamic investment programme. That investment should seek to do much more than simply ensure that the 90,000 people lucky enough to get tickets for that special show on that one night feel the benefit.

Taylor Swift is an era defining artists whose huge impact on her fans and on music consumers presents a massive opportunity for everyone who wants to see live music deeply embedded into our local communities, into our lives, and into the social fabric of society. All stakeholders, whether it’s the music industry, the fans, local authorities, Mayors, National Governments, Keir Starmer or Lisa Nandy, need to walk past the daftly inflated and exaggerated press releases and get into the real grit of this fantastic opportunity.