Why is Taylor Swift so big? ‘She wants it more than anyone’

Taylor Swift will play the 98th, 99th and 100th shows of the Eras Tour in Scotland this weekend

The most lucrative concert tour in music history lands in the UK on Friday, when Taylor Swift plays the first of three nights at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium.

The star will take to the stage shortly after 19:00 BST, playing to almost 73,000 fans, who’ve come from all over the world to see her career-spanning, three-hour show.

It will be the first of 17 UK dates, culminating in a record-breaking eight-night run at London’s Wembley Stadium.

By then, she will have played to almost 1.2 million UK fans, with an average ticket price of £206.

The singer’s last show was in rain-soaked Lyon, France, on Monday night
Swift arrives in Scotland as the biggest musical phenomenon of her era, achieving a cultural weight not seen since the heyday of Madonna and Michael Jackson in the 1980s.

Her 152-date stadium tour is on pace to make more than $2 billion (£1.5 billion) by the time it wraps up in Canada this December. And that’s not including merchandise sales, or the $261 million (£204 million) her tour film made at the box office last year.

Local economies say they’ve received a “Taylor boost” of tens of millions of pounds when her show rolls into town; and one show in Seattle was said to have generated seismic activity equivalent to a 2.3 magnitude earthquake,

To mark her arrival in Scotland, trams have been decorated with her picture, Loch Tay has been rebranded “Loch Tay Tay”, and Edinburgh Zoo has named two newborn, critically endangered tamarin monkeys “Taylor” and “Swift”.

With all the excitement, it’s easy to forget that the last time she played in the UK, on 2018’s Reputation tour, stadiums failed to sell out. According to one report, the opening night in Manchester had 18,000 empty seats.

So what’s changed?