Taylor Swift, who wraps up her Eras Tour in Vancouver Dec. 6-8, has reset the dial on celebrity influence worldwide
On Aug. 22, 1964, the Beatles played their one and only show in Vancouver. A total of 20,261 fans crowded into Empire Stadium for the band’s 11-song set.
The Vancouver Sun reported about this historic event and its accompanying Beatles Fever.
“Obviously, we all expected this to be a top-selling tour, it was just a matter of at what level?,” he said. “It is now by far the biggest-selling history in StubHub history. If you look back to 2018’s Reputation tour, we are over 26 times higher than that. It’s a phenomenon that has been great to follow across the world.”
Forget Beatles Fever. This is the Taylor Swift Effect.
In August, Rogers announced the Taylor Swift | the Eras Tour National Contest as part of the company’s Beyond The Seat program, which includes concerts and sporting events. A total of 35 pairs of tickets per week are being made available to Rogers customers to attend the Toronto or Vancouver concerts and announced “Taylor Tuesday.” There were 384 cross-country winners, with 96 of them hailing from B.C. Of these, 55 have been in the Lower Mainland.
Jana Masiewich, Rogers Arena’s senior director of partnerships, talked about the experience of presenting the Canadian leg of the Eras tour.
“I think we can all agree that there is no greater entertainer in the world right now than Taylor Swift,” said Masiewich. “As a leading company sitting at the intersection of communications and entertainment, this was a great way to reward our customers for their loyalty through the Beyond the Seat program and we are sitting at over one million entries across customers and fans and it continues counting. It certainly ranks as one of our most successful programs.”
Among the mega-fans to win a pair of tickets to the third night in Vancouver is 12-year-old Blayke Vandusen. Like many diehard Swifties, she tried unsuccessfully to secure Eras Tour tickets and was resigned to missing the event of a lifetime.
Fortunately, Rogers staff caught wind of a video posted to the company website by Blayke’s mother, Cassandra, about her daughter being born with a rare chromosomal disorder called Turner syndrome that has lead to a lifetime of severe health problems and several surgeries. Under the ruse of entering a Taylor Swift costume contest, Blayke and her mother went down to B.C. Place only to be gifted with a pair of tickets.
It will be Blayke’s very first concert.
“On a scale of 1 to 10 of Taylor Swift fandom, I’m over 10, so it was really sad when we couldn’t get tickets,” said Blayke. “We made the video to the song I Can Do It With a Broken Heart with pictures of me from the hospital up to now since it told my story. I was totally shocked when we went down to the costume contest and nobody was there and then we got tickets to night three.”
“When the phone rang and said Rogers TS and left a message about the contest contacts and such and I initially thought it was a scam until they also contacted me by email,” she said. “I went to my local library and took out everything I could to research about Taylor and discovered that we were both from Pennsylvania, both loved dance and both have crazy hips. After watching her Shake it Off video, I decided to add the song into my coming Zumba Gold class as a way to let the cat out of the bag about winning the tickets.”
You can see signs of the Taylor Effect all over town.
When the Rolling Stones rolled through recently, the band’s iconic logo was projected onto Vancouver City Hall. Taylor has Skytrains wrapped with her image and her very own Canyon Lights (Taylor’s Version) at the Capilano Suspension Bridge Park for four days-running.
A vibrant mountain side of exposure versus one side of an old stone building says a lot about an artists’ impact.
From breaking the record for the most album of the year Grammy wins to being Spotify’s most-streamed artist and the richest female musician in the world, it seems not a day goes by that Taylor Swift isn’t changing the entertainment game.
She is certainly the artist of the era.