Getty Image / Tom Cooper
The dominant summer of Taylor Swift is nearing an end. The pop star has had one of the best years in the history of the American music industry.
The 33-year-old Pennsylvania neighbor is at the end of her record-breaking “Eras Tour”. The tour is set to shatter revenue records, as revenue for just the US leg of the tour is set to eclipse $1 billion.
Of course, the already massively popular star benefitted from the pandemic. She was set to go on tour in 2020, only for the it to be cancelled. In the meantime, she released three more new albums, Folklore, Evermore, and Midnights . Couple that with her released re-recordings of her albums Fearless, Speak Now, and Red due to a dispute over her master copies, and she had incredible momentum heading into the tour. That helped secondary market ticket prices reach over four figures for the cheapest seat in most cities.
Obviously, Taylor Swift is going to make an incredible amount of money from this tour. And, she’s paying it forward with massive bonuses to the truck drivers who have driven her massive set from stadium to stadium for the past four months. Here is USA Today with more.
There’s no bad blood between Taylor Swift and the people driving the trucks carrying the equipment for her tour: Swift recently gifted every driver a $100,000 bonus.
Swift gave drivers the bonus ahead of finishing the U.S. leg of her The Eras Tour, which has been touring the country since March.
Two companies, Upstaging Inc. and Shomotion LLC, are in charge of transporting Swift’s equipment for the tour, including the stage, lights, guitars, microphones, speakers and more.
Mike Scherkenbach, the CEO of Shomotion, told USA TODAY that the drivers were called into a production meeting where they assumed the topic of conversation would be the tour schedule. The last shows of the U.S. leg of the tour are coming up, with Swift performing in Los Angeles over the next week before heading to Mexico at the end of the month.
Instead, the drivers were surprised by Swift’s father, Scott Swift.
“Scott gave a short speech and said how much he appreciated the service and what they’ve done for the tour for the last 24 weeks,” Scherkenbach said. “They’ve been out there nonstop, the men and women that drive for us have been away from their families for 24 weeks.”
Then, each driver was given a letter that the singer had handwritten and addressed to the individual thanking them for their service during the tour. The amount of the bonus was included at the bottom of the letter, but some drivers didn’t pay it much attention, Scherkenbach said.
“The funny part is, they just glanced at the letter quickly and didn’t look at the amount, so one driver read it as $1,000, another driver read it as $10,000. And then another driver said, ‘Oh, this has to be a joke. $100,000?’ which then made the other ones reopen their letters,” he said.
That is a truly incredible gesture by Taylor Swift. I’m sure the truckers were making pretty good money during the tour to begin with. But, a $100,000 lump sum, even after taxes, is a life-changing sum to these drives. That’s a down payment on a house, an excellent principal investment into a good college fund, or enough to get started to start their own trucking business.
The final leg of her US Tour kicks off this weekend in Los Angeles at SoFi Stadium, where she will play six shows over the next two weeks.