Taylor Swift distributes $55 million in bonuses to her team on the ‘Eras Tour’

Taylor Swift, 33, is the woman of the year. Her Eras Tour has catapulted her to the top of the music industry, placing her as the second-most downloaded artist internationally, with more than 99 million listeners. Getting tickets for one of her concerts is an almost impossible task. Swift has turned her concerts into marathon shows of over three hours in which she performs more than 40 songs, without a break. But despite her indisputable talent, she knows she couldn’t have done it alone. For this reason, the artist has decided to thank her teams’ efforts by distributing bonuses totaling around $55 million.

As reported by People and TMZ, Swift has distributed bonuses to all the team members who accompanied her on the tour: dancers, sound and lighting technicians, catering employees, truck drivers, managers, production staffers... It is not known how much money each worker has received, except for the truck drivers. As confirmed by TMZ, Swift has given each one of them a check for $100,000, as a token of her appreciation for their work with the basic infrastructure of the show. In fact, it was Scott Swift, the artist’s father, who called the founder of the company in charge of concert logistics, Michael Scherkenbach, to give him the news, as he recounted on his LinkedIn account: “When he called Shomotion LLC drivers for a meeting, this was the last thing we expected, thank you. Words cannot express our gratitude for your appreciation, recognition and generosity!”

Although the Eras Tour did not get off to a good start after the controversy with Ticketmaster and exorbitant ticket prices, it seems that the tour — which is not scheduled to end until next summer— is going to make history. It is expected to earn more than $1 billion.

This series of concerts has caused a real earthquake. And no, it’s not a metaphor. Seismologist Jackie Caplan explained to CNN that she had taken data from the two nights that Swift performed in Seattle. Caplan verified that the artist’s fans had caused seismic activity equivalent to a magnitude 2.3 earthquake.

The concerts also bring in huge amounts of money to the cities in which they are held. In this sense, the Eras Tour has broken all existing records. In addition to the international recognition that she has gained in recent years, the artist is once again the owner of her first albums. From 2005 to 2018, Swift released her albums under the Big Machine Records discography: Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989 and Reputation. The music producer Scooter Braun bought the record company in 2018, which caused the artist to lose the rights to her own songs. From that moment on, she decided to re-record the tracks and make them her own again. To these, we must add the four albums she has released since 2019: Lover, Folklore, Evermore and Midnights.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition