Although the jounalist does not like Gaga he has to admit that what happened was significant. Especially his last point about CD sales. This is called respect.
What Lady Gaga Taught Us This Week
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...-us-this-week/
Lady Gaga is good for something after all. She can teach us all great things. Like some kind of messiah.
Amazon virtually gave away digital copies of Lady Gaga’s new album Born This Way this week, selling it for the bargain price of just 99 cents. Here is what we have learned from Lady Gaga this week thanks to this experiment on the part of the online retailer.
Lady Gaga Won
First and foremost Lady Gaga won big from this deal, as did her record company. Born This Way was always going to sell well because Lady Gaga is one of biggest pop acts around at the moment. No, I don’t understand the appeal either. But when Amazon announced its 99 cents sale Gaga and Universal must have rubbed their hands with glee.
First week sales are predicted to have hit 1.15 million units, and Amazon has had to pay the full retail price to the record label. Cha-ching.
The Consumers Won… Kinda
99 cents for a brand new album? Consumers have a victory right there. Unfortunately Amazon’s servers couldn’t cope with the demand and many buyers were left waiting hours for their album to complete downloading. Which is just one of the ways in which Amazon lost out.
Amazon Lost
The Lady Gaga Born This Way offer wasn’t some kind of new-found charity on the part of Amazon. Instead it was meant to promote Amazon’s Cloud Player. It’s ended up demonstrating Amazon’s inability to cope when its servers are being battered. But that’s not all.
Just in terms of money Amazon has lost big. As previously mentioned Amazon had to pay full price for every unit it sold. Billboard estimates the company lost £7.40 on every unit, and with 430,000 units sold at the offer price that’s a total of $3.2 million lost in two days.
People Still Buy CDs
The most startling thing we’ve learned from this is that people still buy CDs. As All Things D points out, around 640,000 of that 1.15 million sold this week were digital copies,
meaning 510,000 were full-price CDs. That’s a hell of a lot of people still buying physical copies a decade after Napster showed that the Internet was due to shake things up in a big way.
Lastly I’ve learned that I still don’t like Lady Gaga.
