BW #96: Taylor Swift

Reuven M. Lerner

Reuven M. Lerner

— 2 min read
BW #96: Taylor Swift

It's the end of an era. More specifically, December 8th marked the end of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eras_Tour) which broke all sorts of records and was, by all accounts of people who attended, an amazing experience.

The concerts, which took place in cities all over the world, were credited with boosting the economy of Philadelphia (https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/taylor-swift-eras-tour-boosting-hotel-industry-economy-federal-reserve-1235371670/) and causing local earthquakes (https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/27/entertainment/taylor-swift-seismic-activity/index.html). They earned more than an estimated $2 billion for the entertainer, who gave 3-4 hour shows every few days for two years.

I'm not a Swiftie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swifties), but I am in awe of her business skills and cultural influence. (And I'm closely related to someone who meticulously planned her concert trip one year in advance.) And given the heavy news that we've had over the last week (between Korea, France, and Syria), I'm happy to look at something a bit lighter.

Data and six questions

This week, we'll look at some data about the Eras Tour itself, thanks to the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eras_Tour) that kept track of it.

I have six tasks and questions for you. The learning goals this week include web scraping, combining data, working with textual data, working with datetime data, and plotting.

As usual, I'll be back tomorrow with my solutions -- including my Jupyter notebook.

  • Create a data frame from the tables labeled "List of 2023 shows" and "List of 2024 shows" on the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eras_Tour). The data frame should have a "Date" column with the full date of each concert, as a datetime object. Remove footnotes from the "Date" and "City" columns. Drop the "Total" row, as well as the "Attendance" and "Revenue" columns.
  • Create a bar plot showing how many concerts Swift performed in each month. Were there any months without performances?

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