The Decibel - Toronto’s Taylor Swift Era

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

After nearly two years of touring across five continents, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is coming to Canada. Thursday is the first of six dates in Toronto, and the tour will wrap up with three dates in Vancouver in December. When the Eras Tour rolls through town, money tends to follow; fans and concert-goers spend on merch, hotels, restaurants… and of course, tickets. Tickets make for attractive auction items, and people fundraising for charitable causes have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. For some people, thousands of Swifties descending upon downtown Toronto can be more like a ‘nightmare dressed like a daydream.’ Public transit systems, like Metrolinx and the TTC, say they’re ‘ready for it,’ but that amount of people will no doubt make getting around the city a challenge. Even couples planning their weddings were warned against booking dates while Swift is in town. Josh O’Kane is here to break down how businesses are getting in on the fun, and how to make the most of the Eras Tour weekends, whether or not you’re a Swiftie. The Globe has created Taylor Swift playlists for every type of listener: for people who want to rock out to her greatest hits, to the elder millennials who loved her since high school, to the songs to put your kids to sleep, to the ones who are soundtracking their walk to the stadium with swagger, to the sneaky covers to convert the non-Swifties and ending with the classic, lyrical ballads to make you shed a tear. https://open.spotify.com/user/kswfenu8tkbjszl0ebou72cgq/playlistsQuestions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Making you a lavender haze mocktail has lychee hibiscus in it and of course lavender. I think there's even some glitter. The bar at The One Hotel in Toronto has created some cocktails inspired by Taylor Swift. The color and just in a tall glass with a sprig of fresh lavender on top really really beautiful and refreshing and of course enjoyable for a guest of any age. They're getting ready for tens of thousands of Taylor Swift fans to descend on the city. On Thursday her era's tour kicks off six shows in Toronto. So they're all just inspired from different iconic hits.

We also have the Bad Blood cocktail served in a coupe with a very vibrant red. We have a Shake It Off cocktail, which is bright blue, thanks to some blue spirulina. It's a playful margarita, I think is the best sort of of description with some gold-dusted blueberries on top. And finally, a small but mighty tequila-based shot, which we've called Who's Afraid of Little Old Me. And it's not just cocktails. Businesses across the city are rolling out Taylor Swift-themed products and events, getting ready for the economic surge that comes with an era's tour stop. Bead stores are stocking up on letter beads for those iconic friendship bracelets. And even cannabis stores are tailoring their offerings.

As the owners of Rosebud, Father Sal, Son Sal, and Uncle Sal, we welcome Taylor Swift. She is doing so much for the city, and we thank you so much, Taylor. We're blasting a Taylor Swift playlist all day from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. Not to mention all of those fans spending on hotels and restaurants. Toronto's tourism agency is estimating the tour will bring hundreds of millions of dollars into the city. But there's also drawbacks to having such a massive influx of people in the city's downtown core, and it will be very difficult to get around.

Josh O'Kane reports on arts and business for The Globe. He's here to explain the economic impact of Taylor Swift and some of the unintended consequences of having the Eras Tour land in Toronto. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Josh, great to have you here. Happy to be back. So the Eras Tour has been underway since March of 2023.

So this is like, we're kind of closing in on two years now. And when it's all done next month, Taylor Swift would have played about 150 shows on five different continents. Have we ever seen a tour like this before? The answer is both yes and no. is sort of on the verge of breaking a bunch of box office records because they've reported their numbers to Billboard box score, which is sort of this industry standard for measuring the size of a tour in terms of like the gross money earned by a tour and also the number of tickets sold. It is, as far as we can tell, the biggest rock tour of all time,

the Music of the Spheres tour that Coldplay is sort of embarking, still embarking on. They've beaten out artists like Elton John and U2. It's quite massive. We haven't seen the final numbers yet for Taylor Swift's concerts. The Heiress tour, as you said, has been going on for nearly two years. The speculation, both from Billboard and Morningstar, which put out a report recently about this, is that it's going to exceed $2 billion and probably more than 10 million

tickets. This is enormous. It's unprecedented. It says so much about just the sheer magnitude of influence that Taylor Swift has around the world. So Swift is going to be in Toronto for six nights over the course of two weekends. That's a pretty long run in a city. Has she done that run in any other place on this tour?

And I guess, what has the impact been for that? Yeah, so she also did six nights at SoFi Stadium, that massive new stadium in L.A. in Inglewood. And the numbers that have been reported out of that was that it boosted the local economy by $320 million, created 3,300 jobs. The speculation we're hearing out of Toronto is that it's going to create about 282 million. Now, I will also say that as a longtime business reporter, those numbers are not always reliable. But it is also true that Swifties will probably come and spend boatloads of money when they're here in Toronto because we have six concerts coming up. Yeah. So that's a lot of people. So if it's, what, 40,000 to 50,000 people every night at Rogers Center, We're talking like 300,000 people basically at those

shows. Yeah, it's going to be a lot of people descending upon the core, whether they live here or whether they're staying in hotels and they're visiting. It's going to be a lot of people for a very long stretch of time. So let's talk about how the city is getting ready here, Josh. Obviously, businesses know this is happening. They're kind of getting set for this influx of people. What have you found? How are different places looking to capitalize on the Taylor Swift opportunity? It's funny, right? You just were capitalizing. No matter whether you're an unhinged capitalist who just wants to take advantage of this moment

or you're one of the many people and business owners that are trying to work within the massive sense of community that Taylor Swift imbues upon her fans. There's like dozens, if not hundreds of businesses around Toronto and Vancouver next month that are throwing like Taylor Swift themed events. Like I've spoken with a culinary studio in the junction here in Toronto that's hosting classes this month to recreate the heart shaped cake that Swift stabs in the 1989 era blank space video, including a hidden exploding red jelly center that's amazing we've got brunches the batashu museum through a party um even the swifties are running they're taking over the metro convention center for the entire run of this like you know

multi-hour day-long things for massive parties at the convention center for 55 a ticket this is the tailgate t-a-y- of course. Yes, I like that. And then, you know, there are also things like some other examples, like we've got bead stores taking advantage of this. And you can make a charm baseless or all kind of baseless for the event. Recently, we sell like about more than three times like a regular, the alphabet beads, especially. We've also got cannabis stores.

So we'll have, like, a little Taylor Swift smoke pack that we'll have so that people can come in, just quick grab and go. Just something easy because there's going to be a lot of foot traffic, and, you know, just make it easy for people when they're on the way to the concert or before or after. I mean, a lot of people in the area, I'm going to be honest with you, they're dreading the concert because they know how busy it's going to be, but they have to get ready for it. So, you know, they're starting to embrace it slowly. We're getting everybody ready for what's going to happen in

the next two weeks. And then, of course, we've got hotels like the Marriott that's inside of the Rogers Center. The whole team is elated and can't wait for the excitement to start. We've got some bracelet making stations. We've had to staff up significantly just because of the sheer volume of guests that are coming. We were expecting it to be many, many more guests than we would see on a regular business day here. So many extra staff brought in. Let's talk more about hotels because there are a lot of concert goers from out of town. How are other hotels getting ready? Yeah, there's so many hotels getting out of the action, right?

Because a lot of hotels are probably charging more than they would, as they often would at major events like Pride or the NBA championships, where you're going to see thousands of people descending upon the city. So to entice people to go to their hotels, a lot of them are doing themed events or activations, as they call it in marketing speak a couple months ago i toured the bisha hotel just down the street from the rogers center which is transforming most of its public spaces and like the floors of like each floor of the hotel into like themed spaces after the individual eras of the taylor swift's album eras and then we've also got the one hotel um you know it's about a 15 walk away, and it's designing a themed lobby. And right now we're in our lobby lounge, which is called Flora Lounge. But pretty soon it will be the Folklore Lounge. We will have a pop-up shop with the Little Words Project.

They are the original makers of the Word Bracelet or the Friendship Bracelet, which we know is an integral part of the Heiress Tour. Downstairs, I'm really excited. We're doing a daily dance class. We're calling it the Shake It Off Dance Class, and that's every day of the concert. So let's walk in through the lobby, and we can stop here at the first tapestry signaling the Folklore Lounge.

Some dried florals, the moss and candlelight. If you continue on in, you'll see we we just had this arrive this morning, really excited. So our grand piano, and it's also going to be transformed into a moss-covered piano, which is seen in one of Taylor's videos from the Folklore album. So the transformation is in process,

but throughout the concert dates, we will have local Toronto musicians doing live acoustic performances. Okay, so businesses, hotels, everyone's betting that there's a lot of money to go around. I understand charities and nonprofits also could benefit from all this attention. What have you heard, Josh? There's a lot that's happening. Epilepsy Toronto hosted a raffle last month for two private suite tickets for the show on Thursday night at the Rogers Center.

The Humane Society of Kitchener-Waterloo and Stratford-Perth, they threw a pair of Aras Tour tickets into a Swift theme 50-50, and the pot wound up topping up at more than $360,000. And just a couple of days ago, I spoke with the family of a boy with a rare genetic disease who some family friends wound up auctioning off their extremely nice Swift tickets at an auction. And they wound up raising $20,000 in the auction to help fund the development of clinical trials for the genetic disease.

And that was matched by an anonymous donor for another $20,000. And then the person who won the auction gave the tickets back to the girls that gave them away. And then the girls gave them to the boy with a genetic disease. It's very heartwarming. I think it's just people are really seeing the sense of community that can be wrapped around Taylor Swift and her fans and her music and really using this for good. I'll also say that in a lot of cities that she stopped at in the tours, which has been

making major donations to food banks, sometimes in the magnitude of tens of thousands of meal equivalents, including places like Minneapolis and Denver. She hasn't announced publicly as of the time of this recording, if she's going to do the same in conjunction with the upcoming in Toronto and Vancouver dates. But there are a bunch of Toronto-based organizations that are doing like fundraising for the Daily Bread Food Bank, which is this major food bank organization with 207 programs across the city. Have you seen those signs all over downtown that say Taylor Swift Way? Oh, yeah. The red and white signs. Yeah. The street signs. Yeah. So Rogers and the city put those up and they're auctioning those off a few each week over the course of November with all the proceeds going towards the Daily Bread Food Bank.

They've already raised, as of this recording, about $23,000. Rogers is going to match that up to $113,000. I actually spoke with the head of the Daily Bread Food Bank a few days ago. He said, you know, this could boost a quarter million meals for Torontonians with this fundraiser. And he wanted to mention when I spoke with him that if Taylor Swift were to match that, we could get half a million meals for Torontonians

through the Daily Bread Food Bank. So I think that's a real opportunity both for Torontonians and perhaps Ms. Swift to really make a positive change in the community. We'll be right back. Okay, so we've got a lot of money coming into downtown Toronto, a lot of people using the roads, using the transit system. Josh, what kind of impact will the Arras tour have on just people trying to get around Toronto in the next couple of weeks? I mean, there's so many different factors

at play here. There's just going to be more people around the core, more than necessarily just like a Leafs game or a Jays game. You're going to have people who can't get tickets, who want to just be near there, going to parties like the tailgate party at the Metro Convention Center. And so we've got a few different sort of wild and wacky things happening the city of toronto is putting a perimeter around the rogers center where it's local traffic only uh so it's going to be you know no through traffic which means there's going to be a lot of people trying to get through there which means there's probably going to be a lot of people getting turned around it's going to be a real mess um so to avoid driving in that downtown core for the next couple of weeks if you don't have to. Yes, yes.

And, you know, the TTC, however, is expanding service. And, in fact, here's spokesperson Stuart Green to explain. What we know from other cities is that they have seen incredible uptick in transit use during the concerts themselves. So we know that there are around 60,000 going to the shows, thousands who want to just sort of touch the building or something while she's in there. You know, it's unlike anything we've seen here, frankly, in some time. So, you know, you factor in all of that. Plus, there are events every single night at the Scotiabank Arena. Even if it were only concertgoers and people going to Scotiabank,

you're looking at probably to 80,000 to 100,000 people. We've got extra service on Key Roots that will be focused mainly on the after show because, of course, people will sort of filter into the events and the shows throughout the day. It's really at the end of the show when you're, you know, it looks sort of in that 11 until midnight time period when everybody's leaving Scotiabank,

everybody's leaving Rogers Centre. That's really where we've got our focus. So what we're doing is we're putting out extra streetcar service. We're also running a couple of special services. So there'll sort of be this Congo line of buses going. These are all things that we've sort of predicted based on experiences we've seen. We also have experience doing this stuff with other events, right? If you think about when the Blue Jaysays in the playoffs or anything like that,

I mean, we've got experience managing large-ish crowds, but this is such an unusual event. We've really pulled out many stops and made sure that we've got tons of extra service out there. We talked about hotels a little bit earlier, Josh. Of course, hotels are also used for like big events, right? Weddings, conferences happen in hotels. So how is the Erez Tour impacting these other kind of events that usually happen in Toronto?

So over the last couple of months, I've actually spoken to a bunch of brides and grooms who all said they were considering booking their weddings around the Arras tour weekends, the Saturday shows, the 16th and the 23rd. And either hotels or their wedding planners basically said, whoa, you probably don't want to do that because number one, Swifties are going to be absolutely swarming these hotels. What's that going to do? It's not just going to make availability difficult. It's also going to jack the prices up. So a lot of the brides and grooms that I spoke with just couldn't even get block hotel rooms in one of them even said in the, in the hotel where they were planning on

booking the wedding conference area, they could not get access to enough rooms to justify bringing their family there it just didn't didn't make sense one couple actually even told me that they were warned like sort of like very quietly by a hotel like we're probably gonna have our lobbies swarming with swifties i don't know if that's gonna be be great for your extended family. So they were kind of warned off. And so you're probably going to see fewer weddings in the Toronto area over the next couple of weekends. It's a really unexpected, unintended consequence. In fact, one of those brides, Leslie Shiner, told a story to us.

So we got engaged December 2nd, 2023, and we wanted something near the end of the year because a lot of the venues we were looking at only had availability at that time. And they had availability in November of 2024. So we thought that would be a great idea because December you get closer to the holidays, not so many conflicting plans for other people. But it wasn't until we actually started speaking to hotel managers that were helping us that we knew it was for sure going to be a problem. It was really a meeting where we had with one hotel manager where we asked her seriously, we're like, we really want to book in a date. What is your opinion? Like, do you really think we should stay away from those two weekends? And she really said to us, like, please do not have it those weekends. You will be disappointed. There will be more foot traffic. There may not be reservations at restaurants. If you're out

of town, guests want to eat somewhere. And the prices of our hotels are just going to be double or triple. So that was basically our answer. And we decided that why would we plan a wedding knowing that there could be anticipated disruption, like we know even just to get downtown. And we actually really would have liked to see the concert. Side note, but we don't have tickets. And we should say Leslie is actually the cousin of our producer Michal. So thank you, Leslie, for telling us her story there. Josh, we should also talk about the cost of these concert tickets themselves, because these tickets have been, first of all, notoriously hard to come by. Like you need to win a lottery basically to

even get the potential to buy the tickets for these Toronto shows. They're going for thousands of dollars. That's a lot of money, but they also seem to be more expensive here in North America than they are in Europe, at least when we look at comparisons of the Toronto shows to the European shows. Why do those ticket prices look so different? Did you get a ticket?

No, I tried, along with most people I know. It did not work for me. I'm so sad. So I got on the phone with Ticketmaster this morning. I'm holding out hope that I can get these last minute tickets. It's official, Swifties are not going to be moving away from their computer tomorrow.

How lucky am I? Like I don't get the tickets, but then I just have to deal with all the chaos in the mess. Oh my God, so I just found out I'm going to the November 14th Airstream Show in Toronto. I'm so excited. Breaking news, we have a new Toronto sale going on right now for the shows at Rogers Center.

I lost the Ticketmaster Award. And yes, I will be standing outside the venue until I get in. Listen, you know, when I got tickets, Secondary Market in 2015 for the 1989 tour, I spent like $200 a ticket. And that was just enormous to me. I couldn't believe it. I was spending $200 for the nosebleeds. That is now normal here in Canada and just kind of across North America. In Europe, things are slightly different. The main thing we're looking

at really is that there's a difference in regulation between here and there. In France, for example, there's been a policy in place since, I'm not joking, 1919. When I wrote that in a story, editors were like, is that a typo? And I'm like, no, it's 1919. But since 1919, you've not been able to sell tickets for more than face value. In Germany, it's more than 25% above face value. Here in Ontario, in the late 2010s, the former liberal provincial government did try to put a price cap in place of 50%. When the progressive conservatives came into government in 2018, they said, no, we're going to

remove that. Every province in Canada kind of has its own different regulations. There's a patchwork as well within the United States. It's really hard to enforce this though. Even in jurisdictions where there are price caps, you always have experts saying people are just going to go to a different website that's more gray area. And they're going to say, and then that's where all the people who want to make a profit are going to go. And so it is hard to enforce. But when I was talking to experts about this, about the difference in Europe, there are a few different things that they came up with. One is supply and demand. There may be more Taylor Swift fans for capital here in North America versus Europe. There's also just the idea of like, we're hosting the last two residencies of the Heiress Tour.

People who have been jealous, people who have watched this unfold on social media for the last year and a half or more are probably saying, this is my last chance. I have to go. There's that pent up demand to a certain degree, but there also may be cultural differences because there may be less of a culture of wanting to resell for a profit there because

there have been these resale laws in place for a long time. It's really hard to pin this down because you're looking at the behavior of the masses in different jurisdictions, but it certainly is the case that tickets were much cheaper in Europe than in Canada. The company Ticket IQ, which collects data about this, told me that concerts in Canada for Taylor Swift's Eros tour were 225% higher on average for tickets than in the EU and the UK. Wow. So a real difference there. Huge. Well, given that these concert tickets cost so much for people here, Josh, it's a real investment, right, to go to a Taylor Swift show in Canada when we're talking about potentially thousands of dollars. I guess I wonder about the kind of chunk that that takes out of someone's cultural

spending. Are we seeing a significant thing there? Yeah, so I talk with people in the live music industry pretty regularly, and there's this concept that they've been talking about that's been kind of bandied around for a year or two called funflation, which is that people are spending on Taylor Swift. They will drop like three Gs and fly to another city or even another country or continent to go see her.

People only have so much disposable income. They have less to play with in terms of what they want to spend on fun. So the idea of funflation is people are kind of being willing to spend more on one massive thing that they're going to be posting on social media about for months than say, I'm going to go see this midsize artist at a thousand capacity venue five times in a given year or go to, you know, another like midsize venue or smaller venue to go see shows. Okay. Well, so Josh, if you're a Swifty, you're probably going to be really excited to hear about Taylor Swift for the next couple of weeks because she is going to be everywhere. But if you're not

a Swifty, like, I guess, what does all this mean for someone the next two weeks in Toronto who may not be that excited about the Arrows Tour? You could probably rent out or sublet your place, honestly. You might as well. Why not? Make a lot of money, maybe. Yeah, exactly. Embrace the capitalism of it all. But other than that, look, you just avoid the downtown core. Like, what's the strategy? I would say avoid the downtown core to a certain degree. I also don't know if this is going to be as massive as people are being fearful of. Again, this city has hosted the World Series. This city has hosted the NBA championships. This city hosts pride. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people show up for these things.

We've survived before. I was emailing with the folks at Mirvish, the major commercial theater company that has theaters right downtown, quite close to the Rogers Center. And they're like, yeah, okay, we've done this before. This is, to a certain extent, business as usual. Yes, it's going to get harder to get around, but it just means people are coming to the city of Toronto. So just lastly, of course, Swift is heading to Vancouver next for three shows there, the final shows of the Arrows Tour. Can Vancouver expect similar things to what we're going to see here in Toronto? Oh, absolutely. I can't wait to hear what our colleagues over there are going to dig up. Josh, thanks so much for being here. This is fun.

Very fun. Thanks. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.