It’s Me, Hi, I’m the Fandom, It’s Me: How Swifties Helped Build The Eras Tour

Abstract

This article examines how Swifties helped build and sustain Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour through fan practices before, during, and after the live event. Drawing on Henry Jenkins’ framework of participatory culture, the study analyses how fan activity took the form of Affiliation, Expression, Collaborative Problem-Solving, and Circulation across both concert spaces and digital platforms. Methodologically, the article adopts a qualitative, triangulated approach combining on-site observations and 32 brief in-situ interviews conducted at Wembley Stadium, London, on 17 August 2024, with a purposive sample of 25 publicly accessible social media posts from Instagram, TikTok, X, and Facebook, alongside secondary sources. The analysis shows that Swiftie participation extended beyond expressive fandom into infrastructural labour, as fans organised tour knowledge, coordinated access, and documented experiences, ensuring the tour’s afterlife online. At the same time, these practices were unevenly structured by regional location, mobility, affordability, and platform visibility, complicating celebratory accounts of participatory culture. Although Jenkins is useful for understanding the participatory dimensions of Swiftie activity, scholarship on fan labour, relational labour, and digital cultural memory shows that mega-tours are sustained not by performance alone but by fan work that is affective, organisational, and commercially viable. Empirically, the article contributes to fandom and popular music studies by using first-hand concert-ground data to show how participatory culture operates across the full life cycle of a global tour as infrastructural labour whose cultural meaning and economic value are co-produced by fans but unevenly captured by platforms and the live music industry.