Taylor Swift's Red Tour To Play Stadiums in Australia, New Zealand

May 09, 2013 12:42 AM EDT

Getty Images for TAS March 13: Taylor Swift kicks off her highly anticipated The RED Tour with a sold-out show in Omaha, Nebraska. Read more about it here!

Taylor Swift is big in Australia. So big, she’s poised to become the first solo female artist to undertake a stadium tour in this country since Madonna’s “Girly Show” tour 20 years.
Swift’s The Red Tour, dates for which were announced today, will start Nov. 29 at the Vector Arena in Auckland, New Zealand, before crossing the Tasman Sea for shows at Sydney’s Allianz Stadium (Dec. 4), Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium (Dec. 7), Perth’s NIB Stadium (Dec. 11) and Melbourne’s Etihad Stadium (Dec. 14)
Michael Gudinski’s Frontier Touring Company is promoting the tour, for which the ticket on-sale starts May 21 and pre-sale begins May 14 via frontiertouring.com/taylorswift.
“Swift is a superstar globally and has repeatedly sold out multiple arenas in both Australia and New Zealand,” notes Gudinski in a statement issued today. “She has proven herself to be one of the most significant female artists of our time and it is a natural progression to see her take her touring to the next level here, with the confirmation that she will play four massive stadium shows across Australia this summer.”
Swift broke the “really really big news” of her latest visit Down Under in a video posted to YouTube today. She signs off, “I can’t wait to see you, so soon. See you at the concert."

Australia and New Zealand are the first international markets The Red Tour is visiting outside of North America.
In the announcement which reveals the dates, Gudinski adds, “I can honestly think of only a tiny handful of solo artists – male or female – who could fill stadium venues today.”
The tour is an upgrade on Swift’s most recent visit here in March 2012, when she played a dozen arena shows in Australia and New Zealand -- her first live dates in the latter market. That earlier tour was promoted by Michael Coppel, now president of Live Nation’s Australasian enterprise.
Ahead of that tour, Coppel told Billboard that Taylor is one of the “biggest-selling pop artists to tour Australia, noting that her arena trek would sell more tickets than Beyonce, Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry have on any of their Australian tours." During her tour Down Under in 2012, Swift also produced one of the big talking points with her performance at the ARIA Awards in Sydney.
Each of Swift’s four studio albums is certified platinum or multi-platinum in Australia. Her latest, “Red,” was the seventh best-selling album of 2012, according to ARIA, despite benefiting from only a handful of sales months before the year-end.