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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
They’re here.
BBC News:
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour will boost UK spending by almost £1bn this year, with more than a million fans gearing up to see the pop sensation perform live, new data suggests.
The Times and The Independent followed up with their own versions this morning.
The Taylor Swift economic boom narrative seems to be irresistible, as people continue to revel at the intersection of international superstardom and GDP coverage.
Last autumn, we wrote about why US news outlets were coming out with such bizarrely variable numbers regarding Swift’s earnings from the Eras tour. Now, the phenomenon has landed in the UK.
Now, we’re not going to accuse these British outlets of doing bad journalism, because no journalism has occurred here.
The source for these stories is a pun-addled press release by Barclaycard, titled “Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour to provide nearly £1bn boost to UK economy”. Cool, nice. It says:
New data from Barclays reveals that Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated Eras Tour is predicted to provide a £997m1 boost to the UK economy, with Swifties forking out £848 on average to see their idol at one of the 15 UK tour dates.
The Swiftonomics report shows that spending by The Lucky Ones attending a tour date is expected to be more than 12 times the average cost of a UK night out (£67), more than twice the amount spent attending UK-based weddings (£398), and even higher than the cost of a UK-based stag or hen do (£779).
The notes to editors breaks down how that billion was made:
As there is no link to “the Swiftonomics report” in the release, the first thing we did upon reading this was to email Barclaycard and ask for a copy. We were told one didn’t exist: the release is the report.
We did however get sent this breakdown of the survey findings:
Some of these numbers are obviously a little bit eye-popping. Even with a rail system as throughly borked as Britain’s, does a £110.80 average travel spend sound likely? Is an average price of nearly £60 a meal, seemingly possibly excluding drinks, likely? It’s impossible to answer without the full survey findings, but it makes us go hmmmmmm.
The problems run deeper. The press release says (our emphasis):
The consumer research in this press release was carried out between 16th — 23rd April 2024 by Opinium Research on behalf of Barclays. There were 200 UK adults who have secured or are trying to secure Taylor Swift tickets, providing a representative sample of UK consumers by age, gender, region, and income group.
There are only a few weeks until Taylor Swift arrives in the UK, so we can presume that anyone still trying to secure tickets is probably prepared to pay a notional price that is significantly hire than the base price, creating potentially significant outliers in the data. Of course, these would only be an issue if a mean average was used.
So we asked Barclays whether these were mean or median figures. They’re mean (the figures), and we were told the median would “will almost certainly be lower”. Sorry, Rishi.
[A Barclays spokesperson has asked pollsters Opinium if they can supply the median figures — we’ll update this post if we get them.]
The problem also run shallower. This is really quite simple — as we mentioned in our original piece: you can’t just add up a bunch of spending figures for an event and call them an economic “boost”. You need a synthetic control to represent what would have happened if the event hadn’t occurred (Mastercard has attempted this in a way that appears more respectable here).
And if the words “synthetic control” make you break out in a cold sweat, just consider the follow question: If they don’t attend a Taylor Swift concert, will these people not eat dinner?
Rounding out the release, Peter Brooks, Barclays’ chief behavioural scientist, said:
For non-fans, £848 may seem like an enormous amount to splash out on a concert — but for Eras Tour ticketholders, every pound they spend is an investment in the memories they’ll create.
While every pound they imagine is an investment in the headlines they’ll create.
Further reading
— What’s a new Taylor Swift album worth?
