"Any jobs going?": Taylor Swift hands out $55 million in bonuses to tour crew
Truck drivers get $100k each and caterers, dancers and performers also get generous payouts
Taylor Swift's Eras tour seems to be doing rather well for the singer, and all despite the odd malfunction with a piano and trapdoor. The tour, which looks set to roll on around the world for at least another year, is reportedly going to gross over a billion dollars, but Swift is already making sure that many of the people involved in it are getting a slice of the action, reportedly handing out a total of $55 million in bonuses. Sometimes you just think you took the wrong career path in life…
Taylor Swift's Eras tour is already one of the biggest stories in live music. She has wowed audiences with 3+ hour sets across the States and is bringing the career-spanning tour to the rest of the world over the rest of this year and well into the next.
To say that the tour has made an impact would be something of an understatement. Such was the excitement caused at the Lumen Field stadium in Seattle in late July, the ground shook beneath the stadium with similar level of seismic activity as a 2.3 magnitude earthquake. Yes, Swift is literally rocking all of our worlds.
Obviously you can't talk about 50,000+ crowds a night for a tour that stretches to next August without mentioning the cash it generates, as well as what it generates on the Richter scale. Some reports suggest that the Eras tour will gross well over a billion dollars – and we've just done some button-pressing on a calculator which suggests that even that figure might be short of the mark.
Whatever the final sums, Swift has apparently already shared some of the loot with the tour crew. Sources at TMZ have said that Swift has dished out $100,000 bonuses to 50 truck drivers. That's a total of $5 million, then, but apparently the truck drivers were not alone, with riggers, dancers, caterers and other crew members receiving 'generous' amounts that could run into tens of millions in total.
The Eras shows will be playing across South America for much of 2023 before heading to Japan, Australia and Singapore at the start of 2024 and then into Europe next May.
You can get more information on the dates from the Taylor Swift website, and if the Eras tour manager is reading this, we are available for any writing gigs you need. Or even general office duties. Toilet cleaning… anything, basically.
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Andy has been writing about music production and technology for 30 years having started out on Music Technology magazine back in 1992. He has edited the magazines Future Music, Keyboard Review, MusicTech and Computer Music, which he helped launch back in 1998. He owns way too many synthesizers.