Joe Public knowing that Taylor Swift is one of the most famous women in the world does not always translate into them being able to hum along to or even name many of her songs. That said, she attracts a remarkably diverse audience beyond the core demographic of young female fans. Much has been made about the custom of exchanging friendship bracelets and, as a regular concertgoer, I can give first-person testament that it is not just a canny marketing claim that she has among the friendliest, most welcoming and inclusive audiences in the history of live music. Attending the final date of her European tour at Wembley Stadium this summer, I was stood alongside a middle-aged African American woman dressed in a red boiler suit attending solo and a couple draped in heavy metal apparel. The tattooed husband wearing a spiked denim jacket with Metallica and Lamb of God patches was versed in the songbook, mouthing the words to every song, and not just the choruses.

Back in 2019, leading economist Alan B. Krueger surmised in his book Rockonomics: ‘Part of Taylor Swift’s genius is that she has managed to pursue economic strategies to maximize her revenue while putting herself on the side of the angels and doing minimal, if any, damage to her reputation’. It is not necessary to be cynical about her motivations to recognise that her giving money to food banks or hurricane appeals is good for business as is keeping the best camera crew or truck drivers on board with hefty bonuses. When, in 2022, Swift announced the first US leg on her Eras Tour (a three-hour plus extravaganza with acts dedicated to all the studio albums bar her debut long-player), fans had to sign up for a unique pre-sale code. Ticketmaster was, however, subject to public and political scrutiny for website crashes, inflated prices and tickets winding up on the secondary market. The star was quick to defend her fans and drop practices such as in-demand seats being reclassified as platinum tickets.

Swift’s genius for reputational management and keeping a broad church on side shows historical caution – certainly in comparison with other female pop stars such as Beyoncé or Dua Lipa – when it comes to using her platform for political commentary. It was a calculated risk, and indication of what was at stake, that, following the September 10 Presidential debate, she tweeted support for Kamala Harris, while calling Donald Trump out for having previously used fake AI-generated images of her to make it appear as if she was endorsing his campaign. Videos of livid fans destroying her records went viral. The former and future president declared on his Truth Social platform: ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.’

Trump isn’t the only one to have beef with Taylor. Dave Grohl, lead singer of the Foo Fighters and former drummer of Nirvana, took a cheap shot at Swift when his band played in London; his reference to them being on the ‘errors’ as opposed to the ‘eras’ tour was a dig at Swift reputedly lip-synching. The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen and the Foo Fighters are quixotic veterans of the road for resisting pre-recording backing tracks. Swift performs vocals live and has musicians playing on stage, but the extent to which technology enhances their performance remains highly classified information. There is, however, little indication that it is greater than most other stadium acts, U2 included. What is true is that fan dedication alongside Swift’s professionalism removes any sense of jeopardy. If audiences have paid top dollar to watch a professional show, that’s what they’re guaranteed to receive.

Demand to see major arena and stadium acts live is at an all-time high. Selling out is no longer an ambition in and of itself. The strategy of top artists links brand management with managing demand. Oasis are scheduled to play eight nights at Wembley Stadium in 2025, matching the record set by Swift. This is hardly a coincidence: she is the gold standard for commercial success and cultural relevance in popular music. In Madrid, fans of Karol G boasted that the Colombian reggaeton singer sold out four nights at Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu Stadium when Swift played just two concerts at the venue. In reality, Swift could have booked four and probably 14 nights in Madrid, but she always avoids saturating the market. It was a matter of civic and national pride that Swift played more dates on her Eras Tour in London than any other city in Europe, and that the British capital was the site of the final concert of the European leg. It bore further testament to the city’s stature as an international hub, a cultural and economic powerhouse, that resale tickets were priced significantly higher than for Paris, Berlin or Madrid. The final London date attracted fans from around the globe clamoring for the opportunity to bear witness to a unique event. An hour before the first support act, female singer-songwriter RAYE, kicked off the show, the cheapest resale tickets to be found online came in at around 1,000 Euros.

Prince William and Prime Minister Keir Starmer made sure to be photographed at Wembley. City Mayor, Sadiq Kahn, was adamant that the final London concerts would go ahead after dates in Vienna were cancelled because of fears of a suspected terror attack. In the wake of the tragic stabbing of children at a Swift event in Southport in the North of England on 29 June, not cancelling the Wembley concerts sent a message out to the world that bullies wouldn’t stop the party and that London was equipped to deliver such large-scale events in challenging times. Taylor’s mother sought very specific assurances from the local authorities – it has since emerged that British taxpayers’ money was used to provide a level of security usually reserved for senior figures in government and members of the royal family. There was an economic rationale beyond such a striking break with protocol: Swift’s UK tour reputedly brought more than one billion dollars to the British economy. Everyone wanted a slice of the pie, from the Hard Rock Café in Mayfair organising special breakfasts including bespoke introductions for solo Swifties to Kensington’s august Victoria and Albert Museum hosting a small bespoke Taylor exhibition rather confusingly signposted to coerce fans into exploring the museum’s permanent collection (on the day I went, fans were as captivated by their idol’s outfits as they were non-plussed by Egyptian vases). Ticketless hopefuls were banned from loitering around the stadium, but there were banners outside the tube exit from Swiftie Dads begging for face value tickets as well as young women branding themselves as Vienna veterans (having lost the chance to see their idol in the Austrian capital) who travelled to London in the hope of getting in.

As an icon, Swift is both a prototype and outlier as regards modern pop stars. Neil Tennant, lead singer of the Pet Shop Boys, has claimed she has no 24 carat gold classics to rival Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean’ or Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’. The second song of the setlist for the Eras Tour – ‘Cruel Summer’ from the 2019 album Lover – as well as a number of cuts aired later on (‘Shake it Off’, ‘Bad Blood’) from 2014’s breakthrough album, 1989 – cast doubt over Tennant’s criticism, which also misses the point. As is manifest in the more acoustic-driven section dedicated to her Evermore/Folklore albums – both produced with the National’s Aaron Dessner during the initial Covid-19 lockdowns – Swift is no slouch at composition or guitar-playing. But that’s not what makes her special. Her gift is as a storyteller fostering community. Crucially, her career began in country music, a genre which places a premium on live performance, and putting life experience into words.

Taylor lost out in the ‘Best Newcomer’ categories at the 2008 Grammy Awards to Amy Winehouse, but a much stronger support network has allowed Swift to play the long game. Her wealthy family uprooted to give the 11-year-old girl named after singer-songwriter James Taylor the opportunity to pitch her talents in Nashville, delivering demos of covers of songs by Dolly Parton and the Dixie Chicks to record companies. Her path to stardom was slow but steady during her teenage years. Historically, female country music was produced for and about women in their early thirties or older. Swift introduced adolescent experience into the equation. And from a marketing perspective, as Caroline Sullivan notes, ‘no country artist had recognised the potential of social media until Swift made it a significant part of her promo toolkit’. Since then, Taylor and her audience have grown up together; the country sound has been jettisoned, but the emphasis on first-person narration and communal experience so central to the genre has remained a mainstay.

‘Eras’ refers both to the period in which her albums came out and the generation of fans they attracted. The first major theatrical set-piece comes early with the electropop song ‘The Man’, which imagines how the narrator would be treated were she a man. In the multiple tableaux of (wo)men at work, there are echoes of Madonna’s performance of ‘Express Yourself’ as the opening number in her landmark 1990 Blonde Ambition tour. While the Queen of Pop self-consciously referenced Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 film Metropolis, Swift’s reference point appears to be Dolly Parton 1980 star vehicle 9 to 5, directed by Colin Higgins. Swifties are serious semioticians, and much like attending an evening of obtuse avant-garde poetry, it is not always clear to the uninitiated what is going on. Repeat viewings of the Eras concert film and further reading have been required for me to latch on to, say, the connection between a snake bodysuit, her 2017 album Reputation and an online feud with Kanye West in which Swift came out on top. That my students are far more familiar with the songbook of Stevie Nicks (a close friend of and influence on Swift) than Madonna is testament in part to this generation prizing confessional auto-fiction in music as elsewhere – one reason Dua Lipa is unlikely to challenge Swift’s crown anytime soon is her first-person lyrics are perceived to map onto generic as opposed to lived experience.

A highlight of the many Taylor Swift club nights that have popped over all over the place is often the playing of the full ten-minute version of ‘All too Well’ (2011), rumoured to be about Jake Gyllenhall, in which the singer predicts that an ex-boyfriend will get older, but his girlfriends will remain the same age. At Wembley, its performance as the last track of the Red album slot received a Richter-shaking holler only later surpassed between songs in the Folklore /Evermore section.

Swift is unique in having become a billionaire and amassed such a huge back catalogue of much-loved songs before her 35th birthday. Retrospective tours, historically the preserve of heritage acts past their prime, are typically performed in reverse chronological order with a token new song or two. By contrast, the mid-tour release of The Tortured Poets Department required the addition of a new (penultimate) act in the Eras show which, on 20 August was, was extended to include another live debut: ‘Florida’, with special guest Florence Welch (who also appeared on the original studio recording). The album did initially appear to be a rare misstep in Taylor’s stage-managed career. No match for its predecessor, Midnights (2022), the release of The Tortured Poets Department on multiple formats in staggered form created a backlash with accusations that she was milking her fans. Critics claimed Swift’s latest compared negatively with Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé’s country-tinged album released around the same date. Spotify, however, tells a different story: Cowboy Carter took over two months to reach the milestone of the million streams that The Tortured Poets Department achieved in just five days. Taylor, in other words, is largely critic proof.

Taylor, like no other contemporary performer, brings to the fore a paradox at the heart of much criticism. Those who experience the thrill lack critical distance; but critical distance impedes the reputedly priceless experiential thrill. Casual attendees such as myself who sought to avoid the crowds by leaving during the final verses of the Midnights set-closer ‘Karma’ missed the surprise worldwide premiere of Swift’s latest videoclip. By this time, the tour had broken all box-office records. Swift bidding farewell at the end of the final concert on the tour in Vancouver on 8 December marked the passing of another era. What will be next?