Taylor Swift performs an Eras Tour concert in Edinburgh in June. Fans are tuning in to livestreams … [+]
Thanks to fan-powered livestreams of Taylor Swift’s blockbuster Eras Tour, Swifties everywhere are attending the singer’s shows over and over (and over) without having to empty their wallets for travel and tickets. But as Eras shows hop between cities and continents, keeping up with start times can be (ahem) trouble, trouble, trouble.
That’s where Swift Alert comes in. The free fan-run app, available for iPhones and Android devices, taps a phone’s settings to calculate exactly when in a user’s time zone concerts will kick off thousands of miles away. The app then sends real-time alerts so the Swift faithful can tune in to livestreams. It notifies fans when hits from each era spanning her 17-year career are about to start and when to expect the much-anticipated acoustic set with surprise songs Swift performs nightly.
Let’s face it. Not all Swifties have more than three hours a day to devote to another full Eras Tour show. Swift Alert makes it easier to juggle Swift-ing with peskier tasks like school, work and sleep.
The Swift Alert app sends notifications to help fans tune in to livestreams at the moments they’re … [+]
Swift Alert has been downloaded more than 800,000 times globally since it launched in August 2023, according to the app’s founder and creator Kyle Mumma, and as of this writing it sits in the No. 67 spot for top free entertainment apps in the App Store. (Many of the app’s features, such as the newsfeed and calendar, are free. A one-time $1.99 all-access fee unlocks the live push notifications during the show, as well as the outfit and surprise song tracker.)
“It is a perfect mix of informative and fun,” one App Store reviewer wrote. “I cannot express how many times their push alerts for concert times has saved me from missing surprise songs.”
In addition to notifications for show start times and highly anticipated moments, the app includes trivia quizzes and a curated news feed that aggregates social media updates from official Taylor Swift social media accounts and some of the Grammy winner’s biggest fans. A popular in-app game called Mastermind involves racking up points for correctly predicting the particulars of a given show, like what colors Swift will wear while performing the 1989 era set or whether the guitar she uses for “Lover” will be pink, blue or lavender. Players at the top of the leaderboard win prizes, Swift-specific of course.
Mastermind use has skyrocketed during the tour’s current 18-city European leg, with 288,000 people playing live during Tuesday’s Zurich show, according to Mumma, a 34-year-old self-described “major Swiftie” who grew up listening to her music. When he’s not making sure fellow Swift fans stay on top of Eras Tour livestreams, he works full time as a product manager for a sports tech firm.
Want to keep up Fearless Era or Red Era sets? The Swift Alert app lets users specify which … [+]
Mumma and his Swift-loving wife, Mia, both Duke University business school alums, conceived of Swift Alert after attending the opening night Eras Tour concert in Glendale, Arizona, in March 2023. Watching multiple livestreams of other Eras Tour concerts afterward, they noticed lots of confusion in the chat.
“We saw a lot of people panic, like ‘How am I going to know when the surprise songs are starting when she’s playing in Warsaw? I have no idea what time it is in Warsaw,’” Mumma, who’s based in Durham, North Carolina, said in an interview. “The initial iteration of the app was really just to help solve that problem.”
The app went live in time for the Mexico City Eras Tour run and continues to update in response to user feedback that pours in by the hundreds of thousands, Mumma said. So how does Swift Alert work and what will become of it once the Eras Tour ends? Here are your questions answered.
The calendar feature lets users select shows they want to follow from a roster of upcoming events listed alongside start times that automatically convert into the user’s time zone. If you want to catch the first of three concerts in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, for example, tap on that show and it immediately pops up in an event countdown box on the home screen that lets you know how many days, hours and minutes you have to slog through before you get to hear your favorite singer perform “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” live again.
A member of the app’s four-person team—three in the U.S. and one, the app’s engineer, in Turkey—watches each livestream and manually pushes out live alerts as a show unfolds.
“We found the concerts just ever so slightly differ from night to night,” Mumma said. “That’s part of what makes it appealing for people to watch dozens and dozens of times.”
Minor variations like the duration of the surprise song set or a longer standing ovation than usual also mean the app’s initial automated alerts could come in late, which prompted the team to put a human at the controls.
“If we’re two minutes late on the surprise songs alert, or even 30 seconds late, and people get that alert and go to the livestream and the first song is already over, then we’re failing to deliver on the basic value proposition.”
In short, they love it. On the App Store, it’s been rated more than 15,000 times and gotten a 4.9 rating out of 5. It also has a 4.9 rating on Google Play, where it’s gotten more than 6,700 exclamation-point-filled reviews.
A few fans have griped about occasional glitches and the premium charge, but most enthusiastically support paying a couple of dollars more, especially for an app made by Swifties for Swifties.
“The amount of love and effort put into the making of this app is clear to anyone who uses it,” an App Store reviewer wrote, “and paying a small amount for a premium version of the app was an easy decision, not only because it supports those that made the app but also because of the additional features it unlocks.”
The app is Eras Tour-centric, and Mumma doesn’t yet know what will become of it once the Eras Tour ends on December 8 in Vancouver, though discussions are ongoing. “We have a super engaged community,” he said. “Since we launched, user feedback has determined pretty much our entire road map and will continue to determine what we build.”
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