What Happened to The Eras Tour?!
Folks, we’ve got a bona fide mystery this week.
After less than a week on the Nielsen Streaming Charts, Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has already collapsed on the charts.
Let’s talk about this unlikely twist, and I’ll explain what probably happened.
The Eras Tour Dies Quickly
There’s a pop culture quirk involving new content, and it’s an idea that translates across mediums.
Generally speaking, when something new comes out, that’s when people are most interested in it.
On the music charts, brand-new albums often debut at the top of the charts, only to fall off after a few weeks.
With movie releases, the opening weekend of a film is when it’s most likely to garner the most money.
After a movie has been in theaters for two weeks or longer, something newer and hotter typically replaces it.
That’s why stories of films and albums topping the charts for a month or longer are so rare today.
Notably, that same thought process applies to the Nielsen Streaming charts.
On the Movies chart, the Originals chart, and the overall top ten, new content often overwhelms the demand for library content.
That statement alone underscores why Bluey’s sustained success is so remarkable. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The story of the moment is The Eras Tour, which I fully expected to hold steadily for several weeks after its release.
That…didn’t happen. At all.
In a shocking twist, the Taylor Swift concert movie fell from 677 viewer minutes during its first week to 310 million minutes this time.
For the week of March 18th through March 24th, The Eras Tour only finished seventh on the Movies chart.
How mediocre is that performance? Well, the film in eighth place was Moana, which earned 266 million viewer minutes.
Moana came out in 2016, and it debuted with Disney+ in November 2019.
The Eras Tour was still technically new during the week in question, having debuted on Disney+ on March 14th.
So, some of the time we’re discussing was part of its first week on the service!
Why Did The Eras Tour Drop?
That’s a great question, and I may not be the best person to answer it since I’m the idiot who predicted an extended run on the charts.
I’ll throw my wife under the bus on this one and blame her since she watched The Eras Tour several times during the first week.
That behavior may have skewed my perspective…if I were serious, which I’m not.
Instead, what we’re witnessing with this film is the flaw with Nielsen’s Streaming charts methodology.
Nielsen doesn’t track second-screen viewing at all. So, if you’re watching The Eras Tour on your phone, that doesn’t count.
How did many people view and listen to The Eras Tour after that first viewing? Yeah, they watched it on their phones.
So, my presumption is that this is much ado about nothing, but it’s such a stunning turn of events that the story bears tracking.
If demand for the concert film has already evaporated this much, that $75 million investment turns from a steal into a lousy deal.
That’s not my belief, though. Instead, I’m fairly sure that this data underscores how different the consumption of The Eras Tour is.
People have no need to watch something like this on an HDTV, and so they clearly aren’t.
Then again, the demand for this content may have been overstated by idiots like me. We’ll have to wait and see.
Either way, people are more likely to keep their Disney+ subscriptions because of The Eras Tour.
That’s really what matters to Disney anyway.
The Other Disney Titles on the Charts
I already mentioned Moana, and I’ll go ahead and fill in the blanks on Bluey.
The beloved television series gained another 1.047 billion viewer minutes this week.
Notably, that stellar performance was only good enough for fourth place overall on the charts.
Three other new programs debuted during the week in question and garnered plenty of interest.
The Three-Body Problem debuted on Netflix and claimed 1.373 billion viewer minutes.
I actually did something extremely rare and binge-watched this over that weekend as a second-screen to March Madness.
As an FYI, I’d recommend this one if you like high-minded but lazily written sci-fi.
Meanwhile, Amazon debuted the Road House remake, which proved successful with 1.322 billion viewer minutes.
The other new title that beat Bluey was Quiet on the Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, a pretty harsh takedown of Nickelodeon programming.
So, Disney content got outshined a bit. Still, Shogun on Hulu gained another 423 million viewer minutes.
Grey’s Anatomy (882 million) and Criminal Minds (568 million) also did well, although that’s shared content on multiple services.
Overall, this wasn’t the greatest week for Disney streaming, and I’ll discuss potential ramifications of it in an article in a few days.
Let’s just say that Disney+ executives are considering some tried-and-true tactics to keep streaming subscribers engaged.
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Feature Photo: Disney+