How Taylor Swift takes over a city (and an industry)

In today’s The Big Story podcast, two weeks from today, Taylor Swift will land in Toronto for the first of six shows in the city on the Eras Tour’s Canadian leg. In December she’ll play three more shows in Vancouver. And when the tour comes to a city, it makes its presence felt in the form of hundreds of millions of dollars, tens of thousands of fans, security challenges, snarled traffic, price gouging and more.

Rob Sheffield is an  American music journalist and the author of Heartbreak is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music. “[The Eras Tour] transforms economies, it turns the entire town into a town that is crawling with people who have travelled to this show from all over the world,  and it’s an exciting thing to happen to any city,” says Sheffield.

So what happens when Swift lands in Canada? What should we expect? And exactly how did a teenage country singer out of Nashville become, quite literally, bigger than the Beatles? How did Taylor Swift take over the entire music industry? And will she ever give it back?

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