By August Brown

Los Angeles Times

(TNS)

Taylor Swift’s long-awaited “Reputation” is already assured to be one of the best-selling album launches in recent history. Now the singer has a stadium tour to go with it.

Swift announced the first round of U.S. dates for her “Reputation” tour on Monday morning. It is set to begin May 9 in Arizona. It is scheduled to wrap up in Texas in October.

This tour will make use of Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program, the groundbreaking if controversial effort with which fans can boost their place in the ticket-buying line (and hopefully beat scalpers) by purchasing albums and merchandise and sharing Swift content on social media.

The effort already seems to have worked in one respect: Last week, “Reputation” sold an estimated 700,000 albums — that’s sales alone, not even streaming equivalents — on its first day of release.

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