Taylor Swift Eras Tour not enough to knock Ed Sheeran off his Aussie throne

Ed Sheeran still holds Australia’s record for concert ticket sales, but new insights from Optus reveal enthusiastic Swifties have found a new way to blow Sheerios metrics out of the water.

It’s the free Eras Tour concert souvenir which has flooded social media sites since Eras Tour began almost a year ago in the US.

And the 96,000 fans at Taylor Swift’s opening Australian concert spent almost as much time capturing the moment and sharing it with the world as they did singing along to her 44 songs.

Optus crunched the numbers of how much data was uploaded via their network during the MCG show on Friday with fans posting 1.7 terabytes (1,787,448 MB) of photos and videos during the three hours and 15 minutes gig.

That is the equivalent of about 446,862 photos or 178,785 short HD videos.

The astonishing amount of imagery to commemorate the occasion was more than double the amount of data uploaded via Optus during Ed Sheeran’s box office busting Mathematics concert at the same venue in Melbourne on March 2 last year.

Sheerios at that big gig posted 819,375 MB of data, equivalent to about 204,844 photos or 81,938 short HD videos.

“It wouldn’t be a Taylor Swift concert without the Swifties taking pictures and videos to upload – and that’s what they did last night, en masse,” an Optus spokesman said.

Swifties posted 1.7 terabytes of data online during the 3h 15m gig. Picture: Getty Images

Swift’s Eras Tour may be the biggest pop hypefest to hit Australia this year but she won’t be shaking her mate Sheeran off his concert box office throne with her seven stadium shows.

Frontier Touring is yet to confirm the final tickets tally for the Australian tour but the MCG predicts she will perform in front of 260,000 fans over three nights, and Accor Stadium is flagging a maximum of 80,000 people per night, which brings her Eras Tour total to about 580,000 concertgoers.

Meanwhile, P!nk’s Summer Carnival is on track to become the biggest concert tour by a female artist with an expected 900,000 tickets to be sold during the Australasian leg of the tour.

Billboard’s local correspondent Lars Brandle said most promoters here count the Australian and New Zealand concerts they book as one leg of a world tour.

“The promoters tend to add the NZ dates to their box office reports because they produce the tour as part of one big Australasian lap,” he said.

“If tickets for a tour date stiffed in Auckland, it’d have a bearing on the entire tour.”

Taylor Swift performs during The Eras Tour. Picture: Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Ed Sheeran in concert at the MCG. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Which is why Sheeran’s Divide tour of the two countries in 2018, which sold more than one million tickets, is cited as the highest-selling concert tour.

His box office feat means Sheeran torpedoes Dire Straits’ record for the most tickets sold on a single tour of Australia and New Zealand, which had stood for more than 30 years.

Way back in 1986, Dire Straits sold 950,000 tickets for more than 50 arena and outdoor concerts over three months in support of Brothers in Arms.

Dire Straits lead guitarist Mark Knopfler.

Adele. Picture: Tolga Akmen/AFP

Like Sheeran’s Mathematics tour last year, Adele’s only tour of Australia in 2017 was also successful in setting new box office records at venues because it was in-the-round.

Placing the stage in the middle of the ground allows promoters to add seats not only on the field but frees up the bays which would normally be blocked by the production being erected at one end of the stadium.

Sheeran set a new record at the MCG on his Mathematics tour last year with 109,500 fans at one of his shows at the hallowed ground.

Adele played to more than 190,000 fans at her two Sydney concerts in 2017 at the then ANZ Stadium (now Accor Stadium), which marked the most people in attendance at the venue for any event since the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

In a 2021 interview with Vogue, when asked what was the most “intimidating and terrifying” live experience of her career, she cited the Sydney venue.

“I would say the ANZ stadium in Sydney. It was sitting something like 100,000,” Adele replied.

Pink performing in Sydney. Picture: Tom Parrish

Other artists who have posted big ticket sales over recent decades include U2, AC/DC and every P!nk tour since 2009.

It will be tough for any artist, except Sheeran or P!nk, to eclipse the 900,000 tickets benchmark in coming years as more international acts include shorter tour legs in Australia as part of their world tour.

Ongoing freight and supply chain issues, combined with cost-of-living pressures, are also limiting how many stadium concerts can be staged in Australia over the next 18 months.

Originally published as Taylor Swift Eras Tour not enough to knock Ed Sheeran off his Aussie throne