Amazon stumbled on Monday when it offered Lady Gaga’s new album in the MP3 format at 99 cents, a surprise one-day promotion that proved so popular it stalled the company’s servers. But on Thursday it is trying the promotion again, and promises that it will be prepared.
Amazon will offer Lady Gaga’s new album in the MP3 format at 99 cents on Thursday.
“Clearly customers are really excited for Lady Gaga’s new album — we saw extraordinary response to Monday’s promotion — far above what we expected. She definitely melted some servers,” Craig Pape, Amazon’s director of music, said in a statement. “So we’re doing it again, and this time we’re ready.”
The promotion is expected to push opening-week sales of Lady Gaga’s album, “Born This Way” (Interscope), above its early estimates of about 750,000 copies, to 850,000 or possibly more than a million. In the last five years, only two albums have sold more than a million copies in a week: Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” in 2008, and Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now” last year.
Amazon’s Lady Gaga deal has been widely interpreted in the music industry as a way for the company to compete with Apple’s iTunes store, the dominant music retailer on the Web, and to promote its new Cloud Drive service, which allows customers to store their music on Amazon’s servers and stream it over the Internet. But the company received a barrage of customer complaints on Monday when its servers failed.
Amazon introduced its Cloud Drive service in March, and earlier this month Google announced its own cloud music service.
Apple is in negotiations with the major record labels and music publishers for its service, which music executives say could be introduced as early as next month.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0ca54cbcc4ca90a790e88671a9eb01cc
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