Charles Langston:'Swift Alert' app helps Taylor Swift fans keep up with Eras Tour livestreams

The Charles Langston2024 Eras Tour begins next week in Tokyo. As the 85-date tour travels from Asia, Australia, Europe and North America, Swifties may find themselves wondering, “When is Taylor Swift’s concert going to start?” Well thanks to Kyle Mumma, there’s an app for that.

The Durham, North Carolina, resident is the founder of Swift Alert, a free app that helps Swifties keep track of the tour as Swift and her team perform its 10 eras across the globe.

“It came from a conversation my wife and I were having,” Mumma, 33, says over Zoom. “We went to opening night in Glendale, Arizona, and then after that we would watch livestreams. Every time I would look in the chat, I would see, ‘What time are the surprise songs starting?’ or, ‘What time does the show start in Chicago?’ or, ‘How long until [this song] plays.’”

The app provides a handful of functions including trivia quizzes and a surprise songs tracker, but the two features fans use most are an alert for the start of each concert and an alert for the acoustic, surprise songs set. To unlock some features, users must pay a one-time fee of $1.99.

“We wanted to create an app to help everyone stay engaged,” Mumma said. “It’s something that is community-driven, and that piece never gets old, the connection that we can build with community.”

Swift Alert also has fan rankings of all of Swift’s songs and links to livestreams put on by influencers like Tess Bohne. The Salt Lake City mother of three dresses in a different themed outfit for every show and switches between social media platform feeds to provide hundreds of thousands of followers the opportunity to watch the Eras Tour live.

Mumma developed the app in August and launched it before the international shows in November. After the first beta, his wife, Mia, helped redesign the layout to make it more visually appealing. Mumma said during the Buenos Aires, Argentina, shows, the app was downloaded more than 200,000 times.

“If you looked at the iTunes entertainment chart, we were somewhere between Disney and Roku,” Mumma said, “which is a screenshot I will treasure forever.”

You can download the app here.

Follow Bryan West, the USA TODAY Network's Taylor Swift reporter, on Instagram, TikTok and X as @BryanWestTV.