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With The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift recently broke a record held by Adele for ten years. In 2015, Adele released her record-breaking album 25. It held the record for opening-week sales numbers until Swift released her 12th studio album. Swift’s achievement has been assisted by releasing multiple versions of her album. Did Adele employ a similar strategy with 25?

Taylor Swift recently broke a record set by Adele

On Oct. 3, Swift released The Life of a Showgirl, her 12th studio album. While it has been one of the most divisive albums of her career, it is also extremely successful. In just five days, Swift broke a record held for a decade by Adele. According to The New York Times, Swift’s latest album logged the equivalent of 3.5 million sales in the United States. 

Swift’s impressive numbers were boosted by the series of album variants she released for The Life of a Showgirl. As of Oct. 9, she has put out at least 28 variants. Fans have scrambled to purchase them, as some were only available for 24 hours. 

Adele’s 25 sold 3.482 million units in its first week. She released a deluxe and standard version of her album on CD and vinyl, and temporarily withheld it from streaming. A number of artists did this at this time, as they found their royalties on streaming services to be frustratingly low. Withholding an album from streaming also helped increase CD sales and download numbers.

The ‘Life of a Showgirl’ artist has taken some heat from fans over the releases

While Swift’s fans are, clearly, buying the variants of The Life of a Showgirl, many have expressed frustration at what they view as a blatant attempt to get more money from them. The four acoustic variants seem to have pushed many fans over the edge.

“If she combined all the acoustic versions onto one CD, we would buy and be happy,” wrote one Reddit user. “This just makes us upset and exhausted.”

“This is just exploiting loyal fans at this point,” added another person. “She wants to hit record numbers but this is exhausting.”

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While some fans say that Swift isn’t forcing them to buy every variant, others wonder why so many versions are necessary.

“She can do whatever she wants but personally I find it dilutes her brand,” wrote one person. “I love Taylor and her music but just find some of her marketing tactics like this so cheap. Of course people can buy whatever they want but people can also dislike things she does.”

People found it surprising that, given the backlash, Swift and her team haven’t stopped releasing so many versions of her albums.

“Has no one on her team told her yet how this s*** comes across???” asked one person.

“The constant money grubbing is such a bad look for her public image and it makes it embarrassing to be a public fan of hers, it’s like people automatically think you’re a gullible overconsumer who buys 15 album variants,” wrote another fan. “Same thing with these variants and the ‘movie.’ It was easier to ignore when the music was good but this is just humiliating.”

Another person joked that it felt like Swift was carrying out a “social experiment” to see how much people would buy.

Adele said her son is a big fan of Taylor Swift

Adele said that when her son was young, he didn’t know much about her career or music. He was familiar, however, with Swift. In 2018, she took him to one of Swift’s concerts. He’d never seen a stadium full of people cheering on an artist.

“His jaw dropped,” she told Vogue. “I got really annoyed! I was like, Excuse me! This is what I do, you know. He said, When we go on tour, should I have a seat next to me with Taylor Swift’s name on it for Taylor to come?”

She said her son was also a fan of Billie Eilish.

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