The Melbourne Cricket Ground – the 171-year-old sporting coliseum – provided an unlikely surprise for Taylor Swift fans last week.

“I hate cricket so I’ve never been,” said one fan, asked to reflect on the experience. “I was honestly impressed at how big it was,” his friend – another first-time visitor – said. “And it was perfect for a concert like that.”

A total of 96,000 people turned up on Friday. Then 96,000 on Saturday. And 96,000 on Sunday, highlighting the increasing popularity of arena spectaculars. Globally, shows in the top 100 stadiums grossed US$3.6bn ($5.5bn) in 2023 according to live music trade publication Pollstar, up 35% on the year before and more than double 2019, the year before the pandemic set in.

With every passing concert – and every glowing wristband handed out – the role of stadiums in the community is slowly being transformed, according to those working in the sector. From exorbitant athletic indulgences, or worse, white elephants, large venues are aspiring to be cultural hubs and economic engine rooms for cosmopolitan cities.

But in an environment with scarce public resources and cost of living pressures, there is justified pushback. In Brisbane, a planned rebuild of the Gabba appears likely to scrapped, and the merits of a modern, enclosed stadium in Hobart has become central to the coming state election. The combined estimated cost of the two projects was close to $4bn. Their ultimate budgets? Elvis only knows.

And so the almost universal appeal of Swift, alongside Pink, Coldplay and other superstar artists, has become a powerful argument for an infrastructure class long viewed suspiciously by those from outside sport.

Swift will play at Sydney’s Olympic Stadium – now named after hotel chain Accor – on Friday night with, fittingly, American football-playing boyfriend Travis Kelce in the audience.

Kerrie Mather, chief executive of Venues NSW and the woman ultimately in charge of Friday’s Swift concert, said the stadium hadn’t been as busy since the 2000 Games. “And with Taylor Swift comes a vastly different audience to what our home teams and sports normally attract,” she said. “The broader the range of events, whether sporting, cultural or major concerts, the better they are serving their communities.”

Infrastructure expert and Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue chair, Christopher Brown, said he had seen a shift of influence inside large venues from sporting clubs to promoters. Brown was on the advisory board for the Olympic Stadium for close to a decade until just prior to the pandemic. He said concerts in that period represented “ancillary income”.

“Fill in the gaps, because football was king,” he said. Now, the throne is contested. “Music has taken a supremacy over sport to some extent, or at least rebalanced it.”

In the competition among neighbouring metropolises, stadiums today are being designed with concerts at the forefront. Declan Sharkey, senior principal for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at stadium architects Populous, says designs are evolving “from functional buildings, generally used once a week to host sport, to cultural, civic and economic assets”.

The two most recently built large Australian venues, Allianz Stadium in Sydney and Optus Stadium in Perth were both designed with features focused on improving the fan experience and logistics around hosting concerts.

And governments are doing what they can to unlock the potential of existing publicly owned venues. A cap on concerts at Allianz has been in place since a noisy 1995 Rolling Stones concert at the neighbouring Sydney Cricket Ground annoyed residents. The state government finally lifted it from four events a year to 20 this year. “We’ll be bringing the best artists from across the world to NSW, helping to revive our nightlife and our economy,” NSW premier Chris Minns stated in January. “It’s a no brainer.”

In Brisbane, the Queensland government is seeking to do a similar thing, lifting the concert cap at the 52,000-seat Suncorp Stadium from six a year to 12, to meet demand for stadium-based concerts.

The busier calendar is testing the ability of ground staff, and patience of traditional tenants: sporting teams. The MCG hosted an AFL match a little over a week after an Ed Sheeran concert last year, prompting complaints from some players. Chief operating officer at A-League club Brisbane Roar, Zac Anderson, said his club – despite suffering from sub-standard pitch conditions this season – accepted it needed to share his city’s primary venue with concerts. “There’s going to be blocks of the year especially with the cap potentially increasing that concerts are on,” he said. “So it is a juggling act, but it’s also something that we will deal with, because we want to be playing at Suncorp.”

These teething issues are seen as a small price to pay as the venues seek greater social acceptance, and greater investment. Brown said there would always be an “anti-sport” perspective, but this consolidation meant stadiums were better positioned to have broader support. “You can’t be building a stadium for one footy team, that’s five games a year, that’s a waste,” he said. “Governments have a role to invest their hard earned money in public good, and public benefit. And you know, I spent four weeks hounding to find a ticket to Tay Tay for my niece … and for her, there’s no greater thing in her life.”