Taylor Swift kicks off European tour in Paris with setlist changes

Taylor Swift fans from North America are going the extra mile — literally.

The pop star kicked off the 18-city European leg of her “Eras Tour” on Thursday in Paris, where she was joined in the París La Défense Arena by thousands of American Swifties who flew overseas to see her.

Thursday’s concert introduced a new setlist that reordered certain eras — including by moving “Red” up to earlier in the night — and combining the “Evermore” and “Folklore” eras, according to social media users who posted from the concert. She also performed songs from “The Tortured Poets Department” for the first time.

More than a quarter of tickets for the four Paris shows this weekend were purchased by Americans, according to Frédéric Longuépée, CEO of the París La Défense Arena. Tickets for the venue’s shows all sold in under an hour, he added.

“To the best of my understanding, a lot of Americans chose to come to Paris to attend this show and obviously visit our beautiful city,” said Longuépée, who estimated “something like 25–30%” of the crowd would be Americans, “which is big.”

Kennedy Smith, 21, skipped her college graduation to fly with her mother, Kathleen Smith, 56, from Texas to Paris to attend Swift’s concert instead.

Kathleen Smith said getting to see the singer was “nothing short of a miracle” — the pair stayed up all night in hopes of securing tickets, which cost them around $1,500 each. The two were first in line Wednesday to purchase merchandise at the venue, walking away with two bags full of Swift-themed gear.

Her daughter called the experience the “trip of a lifetime.”

“This is my graduation-from-college gift at Texas A&M,” she said. “And I’ve always wanted to come to Europe. ... And then to be seeing Taylor Swift, it’s just a dream come true.”

Securing tickets for the North American “Eras Tour” initially proved so difficult that the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing criticizing Ticketmaster’s “monopoly” after the platform canceled ticket presales in November 2022 amid overwhelming demand.

Some fans had reported that their invite codes failed to work, while others said they abruptly lost the tickets they had already placed in their cart. The chaos, which garnered a response from Swift herself, led Ticketmaster to offer some scorned fans a second chance at buying tickets.

The saga continued last year when Ticketmaster halted ticket sales for the “Eras Tour” shows in Paris and Lyon, after the website crashed amid technical glitches and hourslong wait times plaguing the more than 700,000 fans in the queue.

Zoe McCormack, a Canadian fan who experienced the Ticketmaster crash, said she managed to get tickets the following week for multiple nights in Paris, where she now lives. She said her non-VIP tickets here cost €190 each, or about $205, making them more affordable than U.S. tickets.

Many tickets for Swift’s shows in Europe cost only a fraction of what tickets cost for her U.S. dates, making them more financially accessible for North American fans who either failed to secure tickets in the U.S. last year or found prices too exorbitant. Some resale tickets sold for tens of thousands of dollars.

“I’m so happy that she came to Paris, especially since she has that ‘Paris’ song. I’ve been waiting for this moment ever since I moved to Paris,” McCormack said. “I’m so excited to be here. I can’t believe that it’s already here because we got the tickets almost a year ago. So it’s been a whole year of anticipation, getting the costumes ready, getting our bracelets ready.”

Traveling to see concerts abroad is not a new phenomenon, as buying tickets for concerts in the U.S. has become an increasingly competitive and highly expensive ordeal for fans of popular artists such as Swift, Beyoncé and Olivia Rodrigo. Many American fans of Beyoncé also opted to see her “Renaissance World Tour” in Europe instead.

Swift’s next stop, in Stockholm, expects to see about 10,000 American attendees, Stockholm Chamber of Commerce Chief Economist Carl Bergqvist told The Associated Press. Airlines have also added extra flights from bordering Nordic countries, he added.

The pop star was lauded last year by the U.S. Federal Reserve and several municipal governments for her economic impact as “The Eras Tour” boosted tourism revenue nationwide. Europe may experience the same effect, as Bergqvist said Stockholm’s 40,000 hotel rooms are sold out for Swift’s three tour dates there, and that “Eras Tour” concertgoers are expected to inject around 500 million Swedish krona, or more than $46 million, into the local economy.