After a five-year hiatus, Taylor Swift is back on tour, and her fans are responding accordingly. Social media is currently teeming with content about the Eras Tour, and Swifties are sharing everything from outfit ideas and dream set lists to full-length live streams of the concert, which runs for over three hours.

The show’s extended runtime is due to the backlog of Swift’s albums that haven’t had the chance to tour — “Lover,” “folklore,” “evermore” and “Midnights.” “Lover” was set to go on tour in the summer of 2020 as Lover Fest, but it was postponed and eventually canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to this, Swift’s 2018 tour of “Reputation” had stood as her most recent show, until this year.

The stretch from 2018 to 2023 was the longest amount of time Swift had gone without touring since 2009 — before Lover Fest’s cancellation, she had toured with all but one of the albums in her discography. The Eras Tour is finally bringing this break to a close, and, as Swift says in her Instagram post announcing the tour, “It’s been a long time coming.”

Molly Schroeder, junior biology major and long-time Swiftie, was at the second night of the Eras Tour in Arlington, and described how excited Swift’s fans are for her return.

“Everybody is so excited that [Swift] is getting back into concerts,” Schroeder said. “She’s put out all of these albums with nothing, you know, no concerts and such a big fan base. You could tell everybody was excited and ready in there, and that feeling was kind of electrifying.”

Many Swifties do feel like they’ve been waiting forever for this tour. Faith Monsivais, first-year neuroscience major, has listened to Swift’s music since she was six years old, but the Eras Tour was the first time she’s been able to see her live.

“I went with my cousin, my sister and my mother, and my other cousins had [tickets for] night one. I grew up with all girls, so we just always grew up doing Taylor Swift karaoke and stuff like that. I think it’s definitely been over a decade that we’ve been waiting for this,” Monsivais said.

Monsivais saw the tour on its second night in Glendale, Arizona, and she stayed away from social media for 24 hours before the show in an effort to avoid spoilers.

“Some people watch the live streams over and over again, but I just wanted to experience it for myself,” Monsivais said.

Glendale was the first stop of the Eras Tour, so Monsivais only had one show’s worth of content to avoid. For other concert-goers, it’s been harder not to see clips revealing staging, choreography and special effects. Swift herself shares photos of the various costumes she changes into throughout the show, and live streams and videos document every time she plays a song outside of her confirmed setlist. In some ways, the Eras Tour exists just as much online as it does in stadiums.

Some fans, including Monsivais, see an upside to this, especially considering the difficulties many people faced while trying to get tickets due to technical issues with Ticketmaster.

“Because Ticketmaster made the biggest error with [the Eras Tour], I feel like the live streams help that, especially because the tickets became so overpriced. It’s not the same as going in person, but not everyone has that opportunity,” Monsivais said.

Although social media coverage shows spoilers to those attending the Eras Tour, it has been a way for fans to engage with the event in some capacity. Even so, many fans feel that being at the concert live is hard to replicate.

For Monsvais, the concert was important to experience firsthand, not from behind her phone.
“I try to take, like, maybe 20 seconds of a song that I know I’ll want to revisit, but I try to not do that [film every song] just because I feel like it takes away from the moment. It doesn’t even do her justice seeing her on the video. She does so much with the costumes and the backup dancers, it was more of a performance than a concert,” said Monsvais.

Schroeder plans to attend the tour again when it comes to Houston and finds it hard to understate how much she enjoyed the show.

“[It was] literally life-changing.” Schroeder said. “I’m a new person after seeing it.”

As people were leaving the stadium after the first show in Arlington, a girl wearing a V.I.P. lanyard was overheard talking about the show. Before fading into a sea of sequins, cowboy hats and hands painted with 13s, she called it “immaculate,” and the people walking with her nodded in agreement.