Taylor Swift didn’t expect her career to get this big. Just ask Taylor Swift.
In the sixth and final episode of her new Disney+ docuseries, “The End of an Era,” Swift reflects on the unprecedented success of the Eras Tour, which traversed 21 countries and grossed over $2 billion by the end of its two-year run.
“This tour will live on as probably the pinnacle, foremost, important thing that I’ve done,” she tells the camera.
“I get very depressed about pop culture’s obsession with youth culture,” Swift continues. “We designate extremely young people to be the ones who have to tell us where culture is going, and the idea that an artist had, in my case, the privilege of developing — to the point where you’re in your 30s and you know yourself a bit more, and then you were able to make the thing that they’ll know you for. There’s something very special about that.”
Swift was days away from turning 35 when the Eras Tour concluded on December 8, 2024 — the same age that Swift once believed would be her ceiling as a pop star.
The 2019 Netflix documentary, “Miss Americana,” focused on the creation and rollout of Swift’s seventh album, “Lover,” which was released when she was 29. In one particularly memorable scene, Swift discusses her age in relation to her stardom.
“It’s a lot to process because we do exist in this society where women in entertainment are discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they’re 35,” she says. “Everyone’s a shiny new toy for like, two years. The female artists that I know of have reinvented themselves 20 times more than the male artists. They have to. Or else you’re out of a job.”
“This is probably one of my last opportunities as an artist to grasp onto that kind of success,” she continues. “As I’m reaching 30, I’m like, I wanna work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful.”
Swift helped popularize the idea of albums as “eras,” a concept that describes the synergy between songs, music videos, outfits, performances, and marketing choices to curate an immersive experience for fans.
Swift has continued to use this strategy well after “Lover,” adopting new aesthetics and alter-egos for albums like “Folklore” (2020), “Midnights” (2022), and “The Tortured Poets Department” (2024).
With the Eras Tour, Swift tried something different: Rewinding the clock. Each segment of the set list was framed around a different album from Swift’s catalog, dating back to her 2008 sophomore release, “Fearless.” The segments were each embellished with distinctive costumes that recalled what Swift wore at the time of the album’s release.
Swift designed the tour to celebrate her past as much as her present, a significant shift from her mindset expressed in “Miss Americana,” when she described her job as “constantly finding new facets of yourself that people find to be shiny.”
Swift’s fans welcomed her nostalgic turn with open arms, packing stadiums worldwide to watch her perform three-plus hours of songs, some of which were over a decade old. According to the singer’s production company, Taylor Swift Touring, over 10 million people attended the Eras Tour.
Swift’s latest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” was largely written and recorded during the European leg of the tour in 2024. In episode five of “The End of an Era,” Swift says the album’s sound was inspired by the feeling of the tour itself: “so romantic, and magical, and passionate,” and “full of possibility.”
Full of possibility, indeed. “Showgirl” sold over 4 million copies in its debut week — the biggest album sales week of all time. Through the rest of the year (and through Swift’s 36th birthday), it has continued to dominate the Billboard 200.
To say that society is still tolerating Swift’s success would be quite an understatement — a fact that would’ve likely stunned Swift in her late 20s.
“This was a seismic, momentous period of time in my life, and in the lives of the performers and the crew members and anyone who this tour touched,” Swift says of the Eras Tour in her docuseries. “It’s never gonna happen again this way.” Still, knowing Swift, surpassing former standards of success is never out of the question.
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