When Taylor Swift breaks a record, it doesn\u2019t just top a chart \u2014 it sets off a cultural earthquake. As The Life of a Showgirl racks up historic first-week numbers<\/a>, a new report claims Adele \u2014 who\u2019s long held one of the biggest album debuts of all time \u2014 is \u201cquietly livid\u201d about how Swift got there.<\/p>\n According to Rob Shuter\u2019s Naughty But Nice<\/a> Substack, industry insiders say Adele and other artists were \u201cfurious\u201d when Swift surprise-slashed the price of Showgirl to just $4.99 on iTunes during release week. \u201cIt\u2019s a cheap trick \u2014 literally,\u201d one exec said. \u201cTaylor\u2019s gaming the system. Everyone knows it.\u201d Another source reportedly close to Adele added, \u201cAdele believes records should be earned, not discounted. She worked for those numbers \u2014 Taylor\u2019s just buying them.\u201d<\/p>\n More from SheKnows<\/strong><\/p>\n For context, Adele\u2019s 25 moved over 3 million copies in its first week back in 2015. She didn\u2019t release variants. She didn\u2019t discount the album. She didn\u2019t even put it on streaming at launch (she waited a full seven months, despite the album leaking online<\/a> before its release). She also takes years between releases \u2014 which means if she ever decides to reclaim the record, it\u2019s not happening tomorrow. But even if Adele isn\u2019t racing Taylor to the top, the suggestion that she\u2019s privately annoyed hits a nerve because it taps into something bigger than the charts: how Swift\u2019s dominance works.<\/p>\n Immediately, fan discourse split into two camps. Some Swifties defended the discount and pointed out that Adele, who has been compared to Swift since 21 was competing against Red<\/a> back in 2013 used her own marketing tools at the time. \u201cAlso Adele\u2019s album was bundled with a ticket to her concert, which is no longer allowed by Billboard,\u201d one fan wrote (the tactic was banned by Billboard in 2020<\/a>). Another argued that the scale of Swift\u2019s fandom is a feat in itself: \u201cThere is something very impressive about a fandom that is so passionate and the cultural event of it all that they want to own it, to collect it, at a time anyone could easily listen for free.\u201d<\/p>\n Others weren\u2019t so forgiving. \u201cWhile impressive, the achievement rings a bit hollow after all the variants being pushed,\u201d one user wrote. Another fan described how Swift and Adele have both \u201cpaid to skip the line\u201d at vinyl plants, causing smaller artists to delay their own releases. And beneath the industry chatter is a deeper fatigue: \u201cNobody\u2019s gonna give a single f*** that you had 4 different copies of the same album in 30 years,\u201d another commenter noted. \u201cAll this is doing is creating more garbage for the future.\u201d<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t Swift\u2019s first variant storm<\/a>. But it may be her most aggressive yet. Just a week ago, she\u2019d already released 28 physical versions of Showgirl.<\/a> That number has since climbed to 34. That\u2019s thirty-four physical variants of the same album \u2014 in one week. And while the strategy undeniably works, it also raises a quieter, thornier question: why are we applauding business tactics that create more plastic, more shipping, and more waste \u2014 as if that\u2019s a marker of artistic worth?<\/p>\n Pop culture has a way of framing mass consumption as empowerment<\/a> when a woman does it at scale. But selling out isn\u2019t the same as changing the world \u2014 even when it\u2019s wrapped in pastel vinyl and a cardigan. Adele may or may not actually be livid, but plenty of people are exhausted. And that, more than any chart record, might be the real story here.<\/p>\n Before you go, click here<\/a> to see which celebrities own the most homes around the world.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Oprah Winfrey<\/p>\n Best of SheKnows<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for SheKnows’ Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Taylor Swift breaks a record, it doesn\u2019t just top a chart \u2014 it sets off a cultural earthquake. As The Life of a Showgirl racks up historic first-week numbers, a new report claims Adele \u2014 who\u2019s long held one of the biggest album debuts of all time \u2014 is \u201cquietly livid\u201d about how Swift […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2084300,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[354483,391401,23084],"class_list":["post-2084419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-adele","tag-industry-insiders","tag-taylor-swift"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Locals-Reveal-What-Ellen-Degeneres-Portia-de-Rossi-Are.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2084419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2084419"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2084419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2084420,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2084419\/revisions\/2084420"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2084300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2084419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2084419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2084419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/div>\n