There were 152,595 screaming fans, but not for the right reasons.
From August 8 through 10, Taylor Swift was supposed to have concert stops for her record-breaking Eras Tour at the Ernst-Happel-Stadium in Vienna, Austria, but that did not happen.
It was revealed on August 7, just a day before the concert, that there was a terrorism plot by a 19 year old who had pledged his allegiance to the terrorist group ISIS. He and his friends were going to attempt to detonate a bomb to kill people at the concerts. The result was to cancel all shows in Vienna. It is unknown on which of the three nights the threat would have occurred, but many of the 152,595 people who planned to attend could have died.
Sophomore and Taylor Swift fan Emily Pastva watched as these events unfolded on the news. She was met with shock when she learned what happened.
“[If] you want to kill that many people just for the sake of killing, I feel like that is something that is really unhealthy, and the fact that they’re that young…it could be someone in our age group…doing the same thing,” Pastva said.
Taylor Swift is a very impactful person that a lot of people can relate to through her music. She is also an artist that a lot of other singers look up to.
“I feel like if she died…then a lot of artists would probably stop doing concerts completely because they’d be scared that their concerts wouldn’t grow as much as hers did and that this group would come to attack them,” Pastva said.
In the past couple of years, Swift has grown massively in popularity. Her world tour, The Eras Tour, has made over 1 billion dollars in revenue so far, along with boosting every cities’ economy that she goes to. No other artist has even come close to the amount of money this tour has made. It even broke the record for the highest grossing concert tour ever and sold out on Ticketmaster in minutes.
Swift still has a second North American leg of the tour starting back up in October, so there is a chance something like this could happen again.
“Just because it might not have happened here this time, that doesn’t mean that this group isn’t gonna come back and go target someone else too,” Pastva said.
Her fame is something that concerns a lot of people. She is one of the most famous people in the entire world, which brings a lot of attention to her. Fellow Swiftie and sophomore Bailey Sisk has seen her rise to fame.
“All of a sudden… she’s on another level of famous… I feel like that’s a really good thing, [but] that can also be a really bad thing because it makes her a target for a lot of bad things,” Sisk said.
This was not the first time violence has impacted a Taylor Swift event. In July, there was a Taylor Swift themed party in Southport, England, that ended with three little girls getting stabbed, but luckily, they survived. Ever since then, people think that these kinds of events are targeted towards Swift’s fanbase. They are not, though; the fanbase is just so large that they have become an easy target.
“I wish people could just… let her be and go to her concerts and listen to her music without having to worry about all those killings and shootings,” Sisk said.
Swift herself has come out and said when she was about to embark on her Reputation world tour in 2018, that she was afraid of going on tour again after the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, U.K., in 2017 where a suicide bomber killed 22 and injured over 1,000.
After the cancellations of the Vienna shows, she went on with her five shows in London the next week, which some thought to be risky.
Sophomore Philip Lenartz thinks they should “cancel all their shows right now because who knows what might happen,” Lennartz said. “I think it’s pretty brave that she’s continuing to do it.”
Swift has been very open about not disappointing her fans, so many were not too surprised when she went on with the tour.
“You’d think we would’ve moved past this kind of stuff, but the fact that we haven’t really says a lot about our mental state,” Lennartz said. “Especially when it’s [teens] doing this kind of stuff.”