Taylor Swift and Beyoncé are closing 2023 as the No. 1 highest-grossing tour ever by a female (that would be Swift’s Eras Tour, which is still ongoing and has amassed $780 million thus far) and the No. 2 highest-grossing tour ever by a female (Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, which netted $579.8 million). Beyoncé showed up in L.A. in October for the premiere of Swift’s concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour; Swift returned the favor, joining Beyoncé in London this past week for the premiere of her own concert film, Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé. The two women didn’t have to say a single word, but their presence spoke volumes: this isn’t a competition. One woman’s success is all women’s success.
Swift’s close friend Blake Lively was also at Renaissance’s London premiere and praised both women for “aligning rather than dividing”; Lively wrote on Instagram yesterday “When I grew up, women were always pit against one another. It took me until adulthood to see that the instinct for women to lift each other up to their highest potential is the norm not the exception. Most of my best friends are women who would’ve been packaged to me as threats or competition. It’s our job to show younger generations the power in aligning rather than dividing.”
She then joked, “All this to say, @beyonce and @taylorswift neither of you have to be threatened by my pop stardom. There’s space for us all.” She then praised Beyoncé, calling Renaissance “even better than you can imagine.”
Lest we forget, Swift and Beyoncé go all the way back to 2009, when Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video for “You Belong With Me” was interrupted by Kanye West, who declared that Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” was “one of the best videos of all time.” Both women were left in tears after the incident, former MTV chief Van Toffler told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017, and later on during the awards show, when Beyoncé herself won Best Video of the Year, she invited Swift onstage to “have her moment” and finish the interrupted speech.
Flash forward to 2023: “I’m so glad I’ll never know what my life would’ve been like without @beyonce’s influence,” Swift wrote alongside an image of the two sitting together in a theater and eating popcorn. “The way she’s taught me and every artist out here to break rules and defy industry norms. Her generosity of spirit. Her resilience and versatility. She’s been a guiding light throughout my career and the fact that she showed up tonight [to her concert film premiere] was like an actual fairytale.”
Beyond Swift and Beyoncé showing us how to sell out a concert tour, there’s a far more important lesson to be learned by these two icons—when one woman wins, every woman wins, a lesson far more important than any tour, impressive as it may be.
