With the release of Lady Gaga’s new album Born This Way yesterday (May 23), popular online retailer Amazon surprised fans by offering the entire MP3 album for only 99 cents, a full $11 cheaper than iTunes. The sale was such a staggering success that Gaga’s Little Monsters managed to crash Amazon’s servers by early afternoon.
"We’re currently experiencing very high volume. If you order today, you will get the full @ladygaga album for $.99. Thanks for your patience," the retailer wrote on Twitter, as frustrated customers took to writing angry reviews and complaining about stalled downloads through social networking sites.
The discount was in large part an effort to promote Amazon’s new Cloud Drive service, which allows users to store their digital music on company servers and access the songs remotely. The 99 cent album made customers eligible for an upgrade to the premium 20 gigabytes of storage, an increase from the free five GB offering.
With Google having already launched their own cloud music service, Music Beta, and rumors of Apple introducing one as well, it’s not yet known whether the promotion will keep customers on Amazon’s servers.