All work and no play can make the law job (most jobs) exhausting, so we took a weekend trip to Vancouver (tourist signage temporarily altered to “Swiftcouver”) to catch the final show of the historic Taylor Swift Eras Tour. This was the highest grossing concert tour of all time, the first to not only exceed a billion dollars, but well over two billion. Not bad for a prolific songwriter with an incredible work ethic who is only 34 and who notes this as her best era “so far”.
Our adventure started months ago. Our floor seat tickets were honestly gained by more skilled concert going members of the family who had to make it into a ticket lottery. They woke up extra early to be ready online to race for tickets as sales opened. We lucked out with two lottery members in the running, the younger succeeding first. There is significant strategy involved to be in on the first round purchases of tickets these days at a price that already is not cheap.
The problem with an adventure needing to be planned well ahead of time is that other life or work events can intervene. The worst (best?) example of this in recent memory is a global pandemic, second worst example is a Canada Post strike. In our case, a new job interfered for one family member. So StubHub became our friend and a roughly $400.00 solo ticket sold for $4,200.00 (some went for MUCH higher). The StubHub fees were shocking (you have a fairly clear advance indication of what they will be though) but I would have no idea of how else to salvage the situation, much less make a huge profit. One daughter’s misery was the rest of the family’s financial gain, softening the blow of our squad being incomplete.
I come from an era where scalping could not happen legally, now it is big business. I wish I realized this money making potential well in advance of the last date, who needs cryptocurrency when you can invest in Taylor Swift tickets.
The Swifties, as her fans are known, are what make Taylor Swift a phenomenon. My father commented that in his day it was Elvis. Over 10,000,000 concert fans served by Taylor. Billions brought into local economies with cities and businesses fully committed to the adventure Olympic- or Stampede-style. Instead of women swooning over gyrating hips though, in this era, they were exchanging friendship bracelets (arms full of them, apparently inspired by a simple lyric). And it was not just teenagers, they were of every age. Although the vast majority of concertgoers were women (they converted almost all of the BC Place washrooms to women’s washrooms), there were a good number of male fans or supporters of fans, in attendance. Most would likely agree, fan or not, there has never been a show like it. I was impressed, even after having to stand for over four hours straight if I wanted to see anything. The energy never subsided.
There are many ways to analyze this phenomenon. From my perspective, as a mother of two daughters in a world where less than two percent of venture capital funding goes to support women led businesses, there are still ways for women to excel in business, far surpassing male counterparts in this instance - one supporter at time.
Donna Purcell, KC, (aka Lady Justice) is an Alberta lawyer and Chief Innovation Officer with Donna Purcell QC Law. If you have legal questions, contact dpurcell@dpqclaw.com.
