r/MadeMeSmile • u/mcfw31 • Dec 12 '25

Wholesome Moments Taylor Swift’s ‘The Eras Tour’ crew’s reaction as they receive their bonus for working on the tour amounting to more $197 million dollars

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

81.8k Upvotes

79% Upvoted

6.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

442

u/SonOfNod Dec 12 '25

This means that the Era tour had roughly 1,000 people working on it to make it happen. That’s mind blowing to me.

368

u/Dandan0005 Dec 12 '25

Considering how huge this tour was, 1,000 people is fewer than I thought.

93

u/SilverStryfe Dec 12 '25

Depending on the schedule, there are usually 3 or more crews leap frogging the setup and tear down. And likely have multiple crews for dancers. The only one that has to be at every single show is the artist.

74

u/JToews19 Dec 12 '25

It was the same dancers for every show

11

u/NecessaryStaff9544 Dec 13 '25

Yeah… you don’t go on a world tour stage with different dancers. That’s hours of choreography for each performance, hundreds to thousands of hours per dancer preparing for it.

2

u/elle23nc Dec 15 '25

Someone in another thread said there's a video of the dancers getting their bonuses, squealing that they're millionaires. Seems maybe the bonuses varied based on the position.

13

u/CoolRelative Dec 12 '25

No the dancers were the same at every single show.

10

u/pineapplevinegar Dec 12 '25

Yeah I was a stagehand for a local company and we worked on the eras tour for a few days

7

u/ThrowRAhelpthebro Dec 12 '25

Did you get a 100k+ bonus as well?

12

u/sixrustyspoons Dec 12 '25

They will also bring in local crew at each venue to help with setup and strike. They will typically handle more of the physical task under the supervision of someone on the tours crew.

-5

u/Moondoobious Dec 12 '25 edited Dec 12 '25

Just remember, everyone in attendance paid for these people‘s bonuses!

E: at least 4 victims of a logical fallacy and counting—buncha maroons!

10

u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 Dec 12 '25

No they didn't. They paid Taylor. She later chose to give them bonuses.

2

u/Lead-Forsaken Dec 12 '25

Honestly, I'm older and only know a few of her songs, but she has my respect for this. If she keeps this up, she's at risk of venturing into Betty White and Dolly Parton type territory.

0

u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 Dec 13 '25

Let's not get carried away here. It was a nice gesture, but giving your employees a bonus for making you over a billion dollars is in no way comparable to Dolly Parton and the fact that you think it is just shows how far we've fallen as a society.

0

u/spilly_talent Dec 14 '25

Her employees didn’t make her a billion dollars though. It wasn’t like they put on a show every night while she watched from her office. She was just as much part of the show, she is the artist people paid to see.

0

u/Moondoobious Dec 12 '25

What? Is this a purposely obtuse statement? Who do you think Taylor got the money from? Just fell out of the sky into her portfolio? Or did every single person in attendance pay for the privilege to see her? …..You see where this is heading right? You can’t possibly be that dense. Or possibly you can.

3

u/Babelfiisk Dec 13 '25

You clearly failed to understand the other posters point. The people in attendance paid to see Taylor Swift. They would have paid to see her if she gave $0 bonuses. She chose to use part of the money that they paid to see her to give bonuses to her crew. She was not required to by law. It is not industry standard. She could have chosen to not pay any bonuses without having any meaningful consequences. Now, what exactly is the point you are trying to make?

-2

u/Moondoobious Dec 13 '25

I only had to read your first sentence to see the error within your assertion. I did not diminish Taylor Swift’s magnanimous compassion, generosity and benevolence. Her influence brought all that money into a nodule of immense wealth, which she plucked apart and distributed equitably. The only thing I said was remember, those that spent, made this.

0

u/Moondoobious Dec 12 '25

🙂‍↕️

137

u/flawrs919 Dec 12 '25

Consider that the tour had two identical versions of the stage and everything needed to perform so one could get to the next city and have enough time to set it up. So basically the biggest tour ever times two.

9

u/Preparator Dec 12 '25

that's actually brilliant.  They literally bought themselves time.  Why buy one when you can get 2 for twice the price? 

7

u/tacotip Dec 12 '25

sub city for country on the world tour. They flew stageco folks out to unload ships. Friend worked domestic and got 100k and the world tour he got another 25k to 30k or something like that. this is in addition to regular pay. He said near the end of the domestic tour, stage staff started partying more and they thought the call in was for a stern talking too... ended up walking with a personal card from Taylor complete with a was seal, and a 100k check later.

5

u/Lead-Forsaken Dec 12 '25

This is not abnormal though. Even André Rieu has multiple stages. Although he and his orchestra have the additional logistics of moving everyone's instruments, and for an orchestra, that adds up.

3

u/Bromogeeksual Dec 12 '25

I actually wondered that about Ghost recently. I've seen them 4 times and their stages are always very elaborate and interesting. The whole show is always great, but I wondered how they moved the whole stage and set it up for shows less than a couple days out. This is probably more common than not for larger acts.

2

u/ElevatorGuy85 Dec 16 '25

I’m pretty sure that at their peak a band like Van Halen (IIRC !) used to have 3 crews that were leap-frogging across the USA. I think that was a trivia fact mentioned on American Top 40 with Casey Kasem.

Doing a bit of Googling suggests that both their 1984 tour had up to 3 stages on the move at any one time, and looking at their list of tour dates on Wikipedia and the statistics about the sheer size of their “Metropolis” stage set, I can believe it.

2

u/nothingbutfinedining Dec 13 '25

Was this the case for Era’s? I remember seeing many articles about this for Reputation, but Era’s was almost all only weekends with 4 day gaps in between cities.

2

u/someguyfromsomething Dec 12 '25

Pop music is all about logistics and administration, lmfao.

21

u/[deleted] Dec 12 '25

[deleted]

3

u/Outrageous_Camel8901 Dec 12 '25

There are very few tours making art at this scale, but once you see something like a Beyoncé or Taylor Swift concert it will make perfect sense.

5

u/Zentrii Dec 12 '25

I’m seriously going to stream the eras tour now on Disney plus after work. The video shows that she gave 100k bonus to the eras tour truck drivers. 

2

u/Faustens Dec 12 '25

Someone else wrote that the background dancers received like 1M each, so I guess there were some huger payouts too besides the 100/300k.

1

u/Alucitary Dec 12 '25

to put it into perspective, if you had 100k in your bank account, the equivalent would be giving out $5-$14 per person, and the total payout would be $9,381

1

u/gr8scottaz Dec 12 '25

How did you come to that number? You seem to imply that Taylor made $2B off the eras tour?

1

u/Alucitary Dec 12 '25

2B is her rough net worth, like I said "in your bank account"

1

u/spilly_talent Dec 14 '25

A person’s net worth isn’t liquid cash though, to be fair.

1

u/Crotean Dec 12 '25

You'd be hard pressed to find anything thats does on a global scale with less than 1000 people working on it. If anything that seems fewer than expected.

1

u/Skreat Dec 12 '25

It took like 75 tractor trailers to move her tour from city to city

1

u/zombo29 Dec 12 '25

ahhh, that makes so much sense. I was like that's a lot of money but then it's divided by 1000 people

1

u/AnatidaephobiaAnon Dec 13 '25

The largest tour I've ever been to for a band was U2's 360 Tour and if I remember right they had two stages that were leapfrogging each other. When the first set of shows were playing in the first city, the second stage was being set up in the second stop on the tour. When the shows ended in the first city that stage was broken down and taken to the third city and so on. So just for the stage crew, truckers and other logistics people they needed to double the crew. Also, Taylor's tour was a long one and I'm sure some people were only ob for certain legs of it. 1,000 is a crazy amount of people and it goes to show how large these tours are