Sophia Michaels
Miley Cyrus poured her heart, soul, and apparently, her performance salary into her 2014 “Bangerz” tour. “Bangerz,” her fourth studio album, notably re-established Cyrus’s musical career following her departure from Disney Channel. A mix of hip-hop, pop, and R&B, the album turned the public’s vision of Cyrus as an artist on its head. The accompanying tour further solidified her artistic transformation.
Between wiggling her tongue in front of thousands and belting out bawdy lyrics coupled with highly suggestive dance moves, Cyrus reinvented herself. In a Sept. 3 TikTok video promoting her emotional new single, “Used to Be Young,” Cyrus reflected on her “Bangerz” era and said that she paid for a majority of the tour’s over-the-top props with her own money. “I didn’t make a dime on this tour because I wanted the tour to be excellent,” she said in the TikTok video.
“I didn’t make a dime on this tour because I wanted the tour to be excellent.”
As her first post-Disney production, Cyrus saw the “Bangerz” tour as an opportunity to separate herself from her forced pop persona and showcase her true, wild, fun-loving spirit on stage. To do this, she knew she would need to go all out with her outfits, her energy, and the stage design. Unfortunately, many of her stage ideas proved too extravagant for producers, who she claims refused to fund the majority of props that have since come to symbolize the tour.
“The ‘Bangerz’ Tour was an investment in myself,” she said. “A lot of these ideas were kind of so outlandish that no one really wanted to support me in making these pieces.” When no one was willing to fund her out-of-the-box ideas, Cyrus took matters into her own hands. She said she used her performance salary to back everything from a giant, flying hotdog to an oversized cutout of her own face complete with a functional tongue slide.
“I had big puppets, oversized beds, I came out of my own face on my tongue,” she recalled. “This was me and Diane Martel — this was our full vision, once again. She goes like, ‘How would you want to end this concert? The show is so big. How do you end it?’ And I wanted to end it in a ‘Truman Show’ reference, so I flew out on a giant hotdog, obviously, and I left through all the clouds and the exit sign the way that Jim Carrey does because I felt like ‘The Truman Show’ was really a reflection of my life.”
The 80-concert show reportedly made around $70 million in ticket sales, according to Forbes. For many, the fact that Cyrus would reallocate a sizable amount of her profit from the production may seem like a questionable decision, especially at such a tender point in her musical career. Looking back, though, Cyrus sees the decision as an important investment that has since paid off tenfold.
“When everyone kept saying, ‘Why are you doing this? You’re going to do like 100 shows and you’re not going to make any money,’ I said, ‘There’s no one I would rather invest in than myself,'” she said. “So I paid for it all to make it exactly what I thought I and the fans deserved.”
