Odds Favor Taylor Swift’s Lover Fest Tour Being Canceled

• Coronavirus’ growing list of impacted events may have its next victim: Taylor Swift’s Lover Fest
• Lover Fest, Swift’s sixth concert tour, presently includes dates across North and South America and Europe
• Will Lover Fest potentially only be postponed to a later date, or canceled entirely?

Broadway has gone dark for at least a month. Coachella has been pushed back by half a year. The Olympics will go on a year behind schedule. The Met Gala is postponed indefinitely. Certainly, the cultural impact of Covid-19 has been heavy.

For pop music fans, the growing list of cancelations and postponements is about to potentially hit the fan. Will Taylor Swift’s upcoming Lover Fest Tour be affected by this too? Buckle up, Swifties, and let’s look at the odds.

Odds on Taylor Swift’s Lover Fest Tour Being Canceled or Postponed

Odds taken Mar. 24.

Lover Fest is Swift’s smallest scale tour to date in terms of scope. This was to be the pop star’s attempt to stray away from massive, year-long treks playing at global stadiums.

Intended to be a summer music festival style branded to Swift’s most recent album Lover, the tour is currently set to begin in Belgium on June 20 and wrap up on August 1 in Foxborough, Massachusetts.

Swift’s tour only includes 15 dates. This is a much different approach to her prior tours which featured as many as 85 shows such as her 1989 World Tour stretch in 2015. Given that this time around includes only a relatively small string of dates, it wouldn’t be too difficult to adjust the tour.

Artists as big as Lady Gaga and Beyonce have canceled and postponed entire strings of dates in the past due to personal health concerns, so it wouldn’t be an altogether new world to see Lover Fest affected. Even Swift herself postponed some of her own dates back in 2011 due to bronchitis.

Taylor Swift is undoubtedly one of the biggest stars on the planet. In a quick command, she can do or get whatever she wants. If she feels she, her crew, and her fans aren’t going to be safe or comfortable, she will pull out of the tour. COVID-19’s current state doesn’t look good for Lover Fest.

So far, Taylor hasn’t said much about the coronavirus in relation to her own endeavors, sticking to posts of her cat demonstrating social distancing and public outreach initiatives instead.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9z2cR_Dotx/

She posted to her Instagram story “World Health Organization and Feeding America are organizations I’ve been donating to. If you have the ability to, please join me in donating during this crisis.” For fans wondering about the fate of her tour, it’s really just a waiting game at this point, but it’s looking like the dates will be affected.

A Post-Covid World

If coronavirus is still happening in June at the speed it’s currently projecting, the tour will definitely not be happening as planned. But in a perfect world, coronavirus will be managed and well in the rearview mirror by the time Swift’s tour is set to begin in June. But even then, would the shows happen as originally scheduled?

Chances are, the way people work and run their businesses is going to look quite different once the virus is behind us. At least for the short term, business and entertainment will be structured in new and unique ways. Given the close proximity that Lover Fest is currently scheduled, it isn’t safe to leave the tour dates as is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNUV2AR7m0I

When you consider that some of the locations Swift’s shows are set to happen, like California and Spain, people are currently not allowed to congregate in groups bigger than ten or so.

The California venue holds a capacity of 70,000. That difference of gathering size is disparate even on paper. Consider as well that the venue is still under construction (even though it’s somehow exempt from California’s stay home quarantine order) and it seems the stars are not set to align in time for Lover Fest.

https://twitter.com/swiftsupdates/status/1241816532751126534

Once coronavirus is but a distant memory, the world is anticipated to congregate differently. Concert tours and music festivals are expected to function quite differently than in the past. Smaller-scale gatherings, more social distancing, and a bigger focus on at-home media are all considerations that will impact society.

If it proceeds at all, Lover Fest may happen in a digital, streaming-only capacity at this time, or be repurposed as a smaller club show production. Certainly, it’s not going to be the show Swift dreamed up initially, and definitely not on her projected timeline.

Pick: Yes to both (-5000, -3000)