Taylor Swifts Eras Tour was a phenomenon fans ages 8 to 88 explain why [Video]

At this point, it’s easy to recite the statistics of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which wrapped up for good on Sunday night in Vancouver, British Columbia: 149 sold-out stadium shows on five continents. Local economies boosted by millions of dollars. The first billion-dollar grossing tour in history (earning more than $2 billion total, according to the New York Times). One massive Ticketmaster meltdown during the presale, with an executive later explaining that the demand for tickets could have filled 900 stadiums.

The harder task is trying to explain why.

Why, of all tours, did this one become a cultural phenomenon, where every single concert made headlines? Why did fans devote so many nights to watching shaky iPhone footage of the 3½-hour concert? Or as naysayers wondered, why did people spend thousands of dollars to fly around the world to attend a meticulously choreographed show that was virtually the same every time, aside from the costume variations and surprise …