How Much Have Lady Gaga's 'Born This Way' Amazon and Best Buy Promotions Boosted First-Week Sales?
May 24, 2011
By Ed Christman (@edchristman), New York
Promotions around Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" - including Amazon's controversial decision to sell digital copies of the album for just 99 cents on Monday and Best Buy's giveaway of the album with a smart phone -- have both pumped sales expectations and caused gripes in the retail sector about how the album sales will be tallied for the Billboard 200.
With shipments reaching 2.1 million units and strong digital sales expected - boosted by the Amazon promotion, despite its technological challenges -- sources say Universal Music Group is officially projecting first-week sales in the range of 800-850,000 units, and less-official projections are even higher.
But brick-and-mortar retailers who try to operate on tight profit margins for music are up in arms about the promotions, with some arguing that both Amazon's 99-cent sales and the Best Buy giveaway counts should be excluded from the numbers that are tallied for the Billboard 200.
In fact, Billboard's chart executives are excluding Gaga's Best Buy giveaway numbers from the Billboard 200, as both the data service and publication have a longstanding policy of not counting albums that are given away by retailers to consumers at no cost -- either as a stand-alone promotion or as part of a bundle with another item -- for charting purposes. But sales resulting from the Amazon 99-cents promotion will be factored into the Billboard 200, as those sales indicate consumer intent. (Currently no price minimums for charting inclusion have been established by Billboard for the sale of stand-alone albums, as a pricing policy is difficult to police with only sales volume -- and not consumer cost -- being tracked by SoundScan's data collection system.)
If she sells over a million, she sells over a million. If she doesn't, she doesn't. Simple as that. No 'black cloud', no conspiracy theories, no excuses.
If she sells over a million, she sells over a million. If she doesn't, she doesn't. Simple as that. No 'black cloud', no conspiracy theories, no excuses.