Taylor Swift Is The Ultimate Pop-Up Business

No matter how much face-to-face contact has been replaced by online chatting, people love to get together to have a good time. And that will drive tons of place-based face-to-face contact.

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By now you’ve probably heard that QuestionPro has estimated the “economic impact” of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour to be at least $5 billion and probably more. To put another way, the Eras tour had the same economic impact as 53 Super Bowls.

Economic impact studies around events, concerts, and sporting events are notoriously suspect, and QuestionPro’s methodology wasn’t exactly super-rigorous. But QuestionPro is probably order-of-magnitude correct.

As a series of one-time events, the Eras Tour turned out to be the greatest pop-up store of all time.

Taylor Swift cashing in on the future of where / Almany

And that just reinforces an important point about the future of where: No matter how much face-to-face contact has been replaced by online chatting – that is, no matter how many Zooms we’re on in our pajamas — people love to get together to have a good time. And that will drive tons of place-based face-to-face contact, even at a time when interacting remotely is on the rise.

Now that you can watch almost any ballgame at home, in-person attendance at ballgames is still very high – eclipsed only by skyrocketing ticket prices. Even Donald Trump has proven with his political rallies that people get a rush off of the in-person experience that they simply cannot get any other way – certainly not by watching him on television. And in an Amazon world where it’s possibly to buy anything anywhere at anytime – or, perhaps more accurately, everything, everywhere, at all times – there’s nothing quite like the thrill of buying an item in a pop-up store that wasn’t there yesterday and may not be there tomorrow.

The End Of The “Studio Band”

I’m old enough to remember when The Beatles stopped touring. It was the fall of 1966 and after three years of constantly touring the world while also cranking out hits more or less constantly, they decided to take a break from touring. Suddenly they had the opportunity to spend more time in the studio working on their music.

The result, a few months later, was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the first so-called “concept album”. Sgt. Pepper sold a million copies in the first month and The Beatles never toured again.

The Beatles recording Sgt. Pepper with their producer George Martin

The result was an entire era of “studio bands” who played around with music and sound on their recordings in ways that could simply never be replicated in a live concert. A whole generation of fans – myself included – thought that listening to the albums in our parents’ basement was the ultimate musical experience. Live concerts, where you often couldn’t really hear the band, were pretty much just marketing events for record sales.

A half-century later, recorded music costs almost nothing and even famous bands can’t always make a living selling it. (As the accompanying chart shows, recorded music sales peaked in 1999, though it’s been coming back in the last few year as tech companies have figured out how to sell it.) So musicians have to “go live,” touring constantly to make enough money to survive. And fans love it, willingly shelling out hundreds of dollars to hear musicians in person play music they won’t pay a dime for to listen to at home.

In other words, the cheaper it is to listen to music on your earbuds, the more valuable the in-person experience becomes.

If anything, the coronavirus hunker-down only reinforced how much people love the in-person experience. When baseball returned in July of 2020, it featured cardboard cutouts of fans and piped-in game sounds to pump the players up. Watching a home run bounce around among a bunch of empty seats just wasn’t exciting. And pretty much everyone in the world got tired streaming musicians sitting on their couch playing the guitar – including the musicians. Everybody was dying for a vaccine so they could go back to the arenas and stadiums.

So the remote or recorded experience – which so dramatically changed our society decades ago with records, radio, television, or even shopping – has strangely enough become little more than a come-on for the in-person experience.

And that in-person experience is closely tied to the authenticity of being in a particular location, usually with a large crowd of other people – the exact opposite of the trend toward isolated, individual listening that the Beatles started more than a half-century ago.

Exploiting The Draw

I live across the street from Santa Fe Depot, the main train station in Downtown San Diego. From the Depot, it’s a mile to Petco Park and also a mile to the Rady Shell, a concert venue that juts out into San Diego Bay. And it’s never hard for me to figure out what’s going on in town.

If the Padres are playing, then the Coaster – the commuter train from North County San Diego – is overflowing with Padres jerseys. If Chris Stapleton is in town, then the street outside our building is filled with guys in big cowboy hats and girls in cowboy boots. And if the hated Dodgers are playing the Padres, just wait for that Amtrak from L.A. to arrive, because Dodger blue will come streaming out of the train in droves.

Padres at Santa Fe Depot, acreoss the street from my condo, headed toward Petco Park

All this activity is part of what makes it fun to live where I live. I can experience all these events vicariously. But think about it: Thousands of people take the train and walk a mile – two things most Americans would never consider doing – in order to be part of a baseball game or a concert. Even though a lot of them probably work from home and order retail goods from Amazon.

Of course, the pattern of face-to-face interaction with sports and entertainment events is different. They are, by nature, pop-up events – here today, gone tomorrow. Folks in Padres jerseys may come streaming out of the Coaster train across the street when the Padres are in town, and all the bars and restaurants are Petco are hopping. But the rest of the time things are dead. And these days not very many commuters come streaming out of the Coaster train on a typical weekday morning. (I’m amazed the Starbucks next to the train station is still open.)

So Taylor Swift has figured out how to cash in on the future of where – create an experience so compelling that people want to be together. The challenge for those of us who believe in a face-to-face, placed-based life is to create compelling and authentic experiences that bring people together. We won’t succeed as well as Taylor Swift has, but we have to keep trying.