V&A’s Taylor Swift trail: reading attendance and merchandise sales separately

The Songbook Trail at London’s V&A museum, displaying global pop star Taylor Swift’s outfits and instruments, closed successfully after attracting about 250,000 visitors over seven weeks in summer 2024. In particular, the museum announced in its annual report that related merchandise alone generated no less than £1.1 million in sales, approximately KRW 1.9 billion.

A model that generates substantial traffic through a free exhibition and earns revenue from merchandise sales is the ideal income structure many planners dream of. From an event planner’s perspective, however, using these impressive figures directly as the budget basis for the next event is highly risky. As the settlement and debriefing guidelines in the “Case Article Review” file also warn, the traffic of 250,000 visitors and the £1.1 million in sales are fundamentally different datasets that need to be analysed separately.

1. Decoupling metrics: do not estimate spend per customer from visitor numbers

One of the most common statistical mistakes is arbitrarily calculating spend per customer by saying, “Dividing £1.1 million by 250,000 people means each person spent about £4.40.”

• The mystery of purchase conversion: A free exhibition is also open to visitors with no intention of opening their wallets. The report contains neither the number of people who actually paid for merchandise nor purchase records for individual visitors. It is highly likely that a small number of devoted fans spent hundreds of pounds while most general visitors bought nothing. Without purchase-conversion data that compares the precise number of paying customers from POS records with total admissions, any estimate of spend per customer is merely a vanity figure.

2. Revenue is not profit

The dazzling sales figure of £1.1 million does not mean that the same amount of net profit accumulated in the museum’s coffers.

• Subtract back-end costs: Behind enormous merchandise sales sit substantial IP royalties for a global pop star, the cost of goods sold (COGS), on-site retail labour and payment-processing fees.
• The invisible invoice: dead stock: Some items may have sold out during the seven weeks. Yet storage and disposal costs for unsold stock left in the warehouse after the event fall entirely on the organiser as losses. Planners need to assess business viability against the cool-headed net-profit figure remaining after all these deductions, rather than the glamorous gross-sales total.

3. Two entirely different KPIs: traffic versus sales

Through this display, the V&A attracted more than 100,000 first-time visitors to the museum.

• Separate the objectives: Bringing in a free audience needs to be treated as a long-term customer-acquisition cost for the museum, while merchandise sales are the result of short-term monetisation. The two must not be bundled together into a verdict of “a successful commercial exhibition.” From the planning stage, clearly declare the primary KPI: is this a marketing exhibition funded to reach new audiences, or a profit-oriented exhibition focused strictly on retail earnings?

4. A four-stage settlement protocol for free exhibitions with paid merchandise

When planning an event that must make up its revenue through merchandise or ancillary product sales without charging admission, the practical team needs the following four stages.

Planner’s note: cool-headed subtraction carries the weight of the numbers

The impressive sales coverage distributed to the press after an event can make a planner feel proud. Yet before celebrating the substantial sum deposited in the account with champagne, the planner’s first task is to pick up a calculator and begin unsentimental subtraction.

The small, unimpressive number that remains only after royalties have been paid, goods have been paid for and the boxes left in the warehouse have been written down to zero: only a planner who honestly faces that painful, unvarnished net-profit figure can plan the next event to fill both visitors’ hearts and the company’s coffers.