Taylor Swift can’t dethrone Adele despite massive ‘Showgirl’ opening

Despite The Life of a Showgirl album’s record-breaking debut, Taylor Swift has fallen just short of dethroning Adele’s long-standing U.S. sales record.

The pop superstar’s 12th studio album sold an astonishing 2.7 million copies on its first release day alone, making it the second-biggest debut sales week in U.S. history, according to Luminate data reported by Billboard.

The only album to ever top it is Adele’s 25, which moved 3.8 million copies in its first week back in 2015.

While the 14-time Grammy winner didn’t manage to surpass Adele’s milestone release, The Life of a Showgirl still marks one of the most dominant openings of the decade.

Swift, who is engaged to Travis Kelce, kicked off the Showgirl era with a bang, crashing Spotify within 30 minutes of release and setting off a wave of fan frenzy.

The album shattered multiple records, including the largest vinyl sales week ever with 1.2 million copies sold, breaking her own previous record of 859,000 set earlier this year with The Tortured Poets Department.

Streaming numbers were equally massive. Within hours of its release, the TTPD followup album had already become the most-streamed album in a single day on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music, with the latter calling it their most-streamed release of all time over a 24-hour period.

To celebrate further, Swift, 35, premiered a short-run theatrical event titled Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, which dominated the box office from October 3 to 5.