The Eras Tour is over. Now what?

Taylor Swift's epic Eras Tour wrapped in Vancouver this past weekend. Nearly two years and 149 shows later, it became the most financially successful tour in history, generating over $2 billion in ticket sales.

But Eras fever took over the world, even for those who couldn't manage to snag a coveted ticket to the tour. Fans created live streams of the shows and apps that tracked surprise songs and the singer's outfits, amassing an even larger audience for Swift. 

Writer Aisling Murphy, music journalist Suzy Exposito, and Swift Alert app creator Kyle Mumma join Elamin Abdelmahmoud to discuss the Eras Tour's massive impact on social media and fandom, the music industry and Taylor herself. 

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: What's extraordinary to me is the ways that the live stream culture around this tour has evolved. Live streams are generally an accepted part of the Internet. It's been a very organized and very intentional and very wild — frankly — culture of live streaming this tour. I say this is someone who last night was watching a live stream that had 300,000 people watching it and it was in the middle of the night. People were trying to pay attention to like, "Okay, what is she going to do tonight? Is she going to make some kind of announcement?" 

Aisling, what do you make of the live stream culture around the Eras Tour? How do you think that has changed the Internet? 

Aisling: I feel like you can't really talk about the Eras Tour without the live streams, when you think about how many people weren't able to get tickets. With the live streams, the point of them is they're not very good, they're definitely not the best way to experience a concert. But if you weren't able to get tickets at all, I think they were a really accessible way for folks to be able to check in on their favorite eras and tune in for surprise songs, which just opened up the fandom to even more people.

Elamin: What's interesting to me is the way that people want to be there for the live stream is so they can talk about the choices that she made, like, "Is there some kind of signal that is coming out of the choices she made of surprise songs at night?" Which is not unlike the way that people want to be there for a television show. That's not the way that concerts function. Concerts are not supposed to be television shows.

Suzy, do you want to talk a little bit about the ways that Taylor has managed to make a tour that has had literally billions of dollars in sales feel like an intimate television show that you're watching in your own house? How does a pop star go about even doing that? 

Suzy: I think it's by harnessing the parasocial relationship of it all. One thing that Taylor is really good at is harnessing the fan community, keeping them engaged by making it feel personal. She draws on a long tradition of women singer-songwriters who are confessional, bloodletting — every night is a ritual of bloodletting for Taylor Swift. She's someone whose music is intimate. The last couple of years in her life have been like a soap opera, the way that it has unfolded in the show, the way that the show has evolved along with her love life. Like Travis Kelce suddenly being part of the show, I didn't think in 2023 that was going to happen. But Taylor Swift comes from the Tumblr school of radical vulnerability. She was that girl. She was keeping a diary on Tumblr for many years. And I think if you go way back, I remember her in 2014, sharing photos of her in bed with her cat. That's just such an essential part of Taylor's music, but also her relationship with the fans. 

Elamin: Kyle, what's been the biggest revelation for you about the Swift community since you launched your app?

Kyle: We created an app that alerts you about when things are happening in the Eras Tour. It was never meant to be that serious. But we hear from people all the time who are like, "I was really depressed and going through a really challenging period of my life, and this app and this game and this concert helped me to move past that depression." Or, "I'm going through a divorce and being part of this tour in this community helped me to reconnect with my child." Or, "I'm going through chemotherapy for cancer treatment and guessing what outfits Taylor was going to wear was the thing that got me out of bed in the morning." And that is a really deep level of connection and community that we didn't intend to create. But clearly there's this need for people to find that in this world that's really isolated and online. And clearly Taylor is something that really creates that for folks. 

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.