From Harry Potter to Taylor Swift: how millennial women grew up with fandoms, and became a force

By Emily Baulch, The University of Queensland

With Taylor Swift pulling in over half-a-million audience members on her Australian tour, we’ve been thinking a lot about fans. In this series, our academics dive into fan cultures: how they developed, how they operate, and how they shape the world today.

With the record-breaking success of Barbie and Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, the economic power of women as fans is being stamped on the global entertainment industries.

Leading these events are millennial women. While women of all ages turned out to see Barbie, women aged 25 and older made up 38% of the audience by the second week of its release. Likewise, a significant chunk of Swifties belong to the millennial age group, much like 34-year-old Taylor Swift herself.

Female fans followed Swift to the 2024 Super Bowl, and many advertisers targeted this female Gen Z and millennial audience. The challenge to gender stereotypes around sport and fandom echoes the support for the Matildas during the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia, which opened up a new space of representation.

Women’s fandom is increasingly a visible and powerful force in many spaces of pop culture, media and entertainment.

Training fandoms

Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, were taught to buy into their passions thanks to growing up in the golden age of franchises, from Harry Potter to Twilight to the Hunger Games. As these fandoms grew, millennial women increasingly found themselves playing a major role as audiences and consumers.

The first Harry Potter book was released in 1997, and the first film in 2001.

Today, there is no shortage of ways to buy into the Harry Potter world. From mugs to broomsticks, from clothes to limited-edition books, there is a constant range of objects to buy. Potter merchandise has existed since the early 2000s, with early merchandise including items like “secret boxes” containing mystery trinkets. The Wizarding World brand launched in 2018. Encompassing things like bags, jewellery and cosmetics, the brand saw demand and merchandising formalised.

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