I've got to hand it to Taylor Swift, she made an absolute fortune out of her era's tour, estimates vary from anywhere between £2 to £4 billion, not bad for a year's work.
And in fairness the shows may have been expensive, but at least the fans got a solid 3 hours of mega-performance.
And she's handed out almost $200 million in bonuses to the people who worked on every aspect of her tour, from the dancers to the truck drivers.
The later apparently got $100K bonuses in 2023, so this isn't the first time she's done this, which is a life-changing amount of money for them, enough to put down a deposit on a house for example. Not enough to quit work, but fair play this is something Taylor didn't have to do.
Of course doing this makes good business sense... it's great publicity, giving out massive bonuses to the people who made the tour possible, and it recognises that without the huge crew supporting her, there could be no tour, so why not share some of the money.
And now with her next tour, it's going to engender loyalty with any returners, and probably also with any newcomers who are likely to go above and beyond in anticipation of getting a bonus.
It's kind of a fly-wheel effect I guess.
And while the figures are life changing, percentage wise it's not a huge amount of money to dish out, something in the region of 10% of the revenue is going back to the workers.
But I honestly don't think this is about big businesses, I think it's just the fact that Taylor Swift is a reasonable human being, and this is basically an appropriate thing to do - give a share of the profits to the people that helped you make the profit.
Recognising that even though you are the main star, you are still dependent on other people.
It's totally in sync with her general ethos.
It's also depressingly uncommon, and most definitely NOT business as usual, but nice to see some ordinary workers getting a kick-back, it's not as if EVERYONE is capable of doing high skilled jobs which attract high salaries, for many of these ordinary workers this is probably the only break they were likely to get, so fair play again to Swift!