'Are Taylor Swift Tickets Worth It?': Bureau Of Statistics

The Australian Bureau Of Statistics have made an interesting point with the price of tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, comparing it to The Beatles’ sole visit Down Under in 1964.

READ MORE: Everything You Need To Know About Taylor Swift’s Australian ‘Eras’ Tour

The Beatles toured Australia that – just a few months shy of 60 years ago – playing two shows every night over 10 dates. To see them, you’d have faced a ticket charge of $3.70 – which seems like nothing compared to the $65.90 it costs for the cheapest seats at the Eras show, but actually comes to $62.95 when adjusted for inflation.

It’s worth noting, of course, that $65.90 wouldn’t get you good seats to see Swift – they’re seats with restricted views of the stage, at the farthest ends of the venues (Accor Stadium in Sydney and the Melbourne Cricket Ground). The second-cheapest tickets are $79.90, and the most expensive are $379.90 – whereas The Beatles’ tickets were one-size-fits-all, so the best seats in the house still cost today’s equivalent of $62.95.

With that in mind, assuming you could only possibly accept the best seats in the house, it costs roughly six times to see Swift in 2024 than it would to see The Beatles in 1964. That’s pretty damn wild – but then again, the two shows aren’t that comparable to begin with.

For starters, The Beatles’ Aussie shows were much, much smaller than Swift’s will be – in Sydney, the former band performed at the now-demolished Sydney Stadium, which held 15,000 punters; Swift, on the other hand, will play to some 83,500 at a time when she takes the stage at Accor Stadium.

Then there’s the scope of the stage production: for The Beatles’ tour, they performed sets that ran for about 30 minutes each (with setlists spanning between ten and 12 songs), and their stages were set up with simple lighting rigs and no theatrical production. On the other hand, Swift’s Eras show packs in 45 songs across more than three hours of stage time, with a huge production including backup dancers, pyrotechnics, video screens and strobe displays.

If you’re shelling out for the most expensive tickets to Swift’s show, you’re settling in for a set more than six times as long as The Beatles’, with a production that makes the latter act’s look amateurish by comparison. Ergo, it’s easy to argue those $380 tickets are worth just as much as The Beatles’ $63 tickets. And if you swing for those $65.90 tickets, you might not have the best view of the stage, but the show taking place on it is immeasurably more substantial than The Beatles’ was.

Both shows come from acts who are arguably equal in stature: The Beatles were the biggest pop band in the world in 1964, and Taylor Swift is the biggest pop artist in the world in 2024. So in many ways, you could argue that Swift’s show offers much, much better value than The Beatles’ did.

Nevertheless, all tickets to the Australian shows on Swift’s Eras tour are sold out. The tour kicks off tomorrow (February 16) with three back-to-back Melbourne shows, followed by four in Sydney – head here for all the info you’ll need ahead of the run itself.