---
type: claim
domain: entertainment
secondary_domains: [cultural-dynamics]
description: "Academic analysis frames concert tours as worldbuilding infrastructure that coordinates communal meaning-making at scale through transmedia storytelling"
confidence: experimental
source: "Journal of the American Musicological Society, 'Experiencing Eras, Worldbuilding, and the Prismatic Liveness of Taylor Swift and The Eras Tour' (2024)"
created: 2026-03-11
depends_on: ["narratives are infrastructure not just communication because they coordinate action at civilizational scale"]
---

# Worldbuilding as narrative infrastructure creates communal meaning through transmedia coordination of audience experience

Academic musicologists are analyzing major concert tours using "worldbuilding" frameworks traditionally applied to fictional universes, treating live performance as narrative infrastructure rather than mere entertainment. The Eras Tour demonstrates how "intricate and expansive worldbuilding employs tools ranging from costume changes to transitions in scenery, while lighting effects contrast with song- and era-specific video projections" to create coherent narrative experiences that coordinate audience emotional and social responses.

This worldbuilding operates as infrastructure because it creates persistent reference points that audiences use to organize meaning. The tour's structure around distinct "eras" provides narrative scaffolding that millions of people simultaneously use to interpret their own life experiences—what the source describes as audiences seeing "themselves reflected in Swift's evolution." The "reinvention and worldbuilding at the core of Swift's star persona" creates a shared symbolic vocabulary that enables communal meaning-making.

The "church-like aspect of going to concerts with mega artists like Swift" emerges from this infrastructure function: the tour provides ritualized communal experiences where "it's all about community and being part of a movement." This fills what the source identifies as society "craving communal experiences amid increasing isolation"—a meaning infrastructure gap that traditional institutions no longer fill.

The academic framing is significant: top-tier musicology journals treating concert tours as "transmedia storytelling and worldbuilding" validates that narrative infrastructure operates across media forms, not just in traditional storytelling formats. The 3-hour concert functions as "the soundtrack of millions of lives" precisely because it provides narrative architecture that audiences can inhabit and use to coordinate shared meaning.

## Evidence
- Journal of the American Musicological Society (top-tier academic journal) analyzing tour as "virtuosic exercises in transmedia storytelling and worldbuilding"
- "Intricate and expansive worldbuilding employs tools ranging from costume changes to transitions in scenery, while lighting effects contrast with song- and era-specific video projections"
- "Reinvention and worldbuilding at the core of Swift's star persona"
- Audience descriptions of "church-like aspect" where "it's all about community and being part of a movement"
- "Society is craving communal experiences amid increasing isolation"
- Tour as "cultural touchstone" where "audiences see themselves reflected in Swift's evolution"


### Additional Evidence (confirm)
*Source: [[2026-03-18-synthesis-collaborative-fiction-governance-spectrum]] | Added: 2026-03-18*

SCP Foundation with 9,800+ objects and 6,300+ tales demonstrates that protocol-distributed authorship (standardized format + peer review + voting) produces coherent worldbuilding at massive scale without centralized editorial authority. The emergent canonical clusters form organically through community consensus rather than top-down coordination. This confirms that worldbuilding can scale through structural constraints rather than editorial control, though it does NOT produce linear narrative (which requires concentrated authority per the tradeoff claim).

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[narratives are infrastructure not just communication because they coordinate action at civilizational scale]]
- [[creator-world-building-converts-viewers-into-returning-communities-by-creating-belonging-audiences-can-recognize-participate-in-and-return-to]]

Topics:
- domains/entertainment/_map
- foundations/cultural-dynamics/_map
