When Taylor Swift breaks a record, it doesn’t just top a chart — it sets off a cultural earthquake. As The Life of a Showgirl racks up historic first-week numbers, a new report claims Adele — who’s long held one of the biggest album debuts of all time — is “quietly livid” about how Swift got there.
According to Rob Shuter’s Naughty But Nice Substack, industry insiders say Adele and other artists were “furious” when Swift surprise-slashed the price of Showgirl to just $4.99 on iTunes during release week. “It’s a cheap trick — literally,” one exec said. “Taylor’s gaming the system. Everyone knows it.” Another source reportedly close to Adele added, “Adele believes records should be earned, not discounted. She worked for those numbers — Taylor’s just buying them.”
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For context, Adele’s 25 moved over 3 million copies in its first week back in 2015. She didn’t release variants. She didn’t discount the album. She didn’t even put it on streaming at launch (she waited a full seven months, despite the album leaking online before its release). She also takes years between releases — which means if she ever decides to reclaim the record, it’s not happening tomorrow. But even if Adele isn’t racing Taylor to the top, the suggestion that she’s privately annoyed hits a nerve because it taps into something bigger than the charts: how Swift’s dominance works.
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 back in 2013 used her own marketing tools at the time. “Also Adele’s album was bundled with a ticket to her concert, which is no longer allowed by Billboard,” one fan wrote (the tactic was banned by Billboard in 2020). Another argued that the scale of Swift’s fandom is a feat in itself: “There 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.”
Others weren’t so forgiving. “While impressive, the achievement rings a bit hollow after all the variants being pushed,” one user wrote. Another fan described how Swift and Adele have both “paid to skip the line” at vinyl plants, causing smaller artists to delay their own releases. And beneath the industry chatter is a deeper fatigue: “Nobody’s gonna give a single f*** that you had 4 different copies of the same album in 30 years,” another commenter noted. “All this is doing is creating more garbage for the future.”
This isn’t Swift’s first variant storm. But it may be her most aggressive yet. Just a week ago, she’d already released 28 physical versions of Showgirl. That number has since climbed to 34. That’s thirty-four physical variants of the same album — 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 — as if that’s a marker of artistic worth?
Pop culture has a way of framing mass consumption as empowerment when a woman does it at scale. But selling out isn’t the same as changing the world — even when it’s 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.
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