LADY GAGA ALBUM BORN THIS WAY FOR ONLY 99 CENTS ON AMAZON

Lady Gaga’s new album “Born This Way” was available one day only for download from Amazon for 99 Cents, $11 less than from iTunes – a campaign that brought Amazon Cloud to its knees. Lady Gaga usually stands for pop music and crazy outfits, but on Monday she unintentionally became a symbol for something else: The snags in Cloud Computing. The release of her new album “Born This Way” was accompanied by a colossal marketing campaign during which the singer surprised her fans with a one-day special sale of the MP3 version of her album at Amazon for 99 Cents - $11 less than at iTunes. The promotion was of course also intended to promote Amazon’s Cloud Service, with which the user can store music data on a remote server and stream it over the Web to PC and smartphones. But Amazon underestimated the thriftiness of Lady Gaga’s fans. Amazon’s servers were at a standstill due to the campaign in the early afternoon, and although users could listen to all the songs, they couldn’t download the album.

So what did the frustrated customers in the age of Social Networks et al. do? They ventilated on Twitter, Facebook and Co. The frustrated customers also let their opinion be known on Amazon’s “Born This Way” product page – numerous reviews commenting the incident were posted.

“Very disappointed”, wrote a customer in a one-star review of the album. “I guess next time I’ll pay the full price and get the album immediately on iTunes.”

The only public announcement from Amazon in regard to the incident was a Twitter that went approximately: “We are experiencing heavy volume on our server. If you place your order still today, you will receive the Lady Gaga album for $0,099. Thank you for your patience.”

General consent amongst music industry professionals is that Cloud Services (the personal music library is available conveniently and on demand via the web for streaming on all devices) is the next big thing in internet music distribution, already being a significant field for retailers and technology providers. Google introduced its own Cloud Service “Music Beta” in the USA this month and Apple is expected introduce its own Music Cloud shortly.

Amazon offers its customers 5 GB free storage in the Cloud, and raises it to 20 Gigabyte for each customer who buys an album. Amazon is attempting to establish its service before Apple starts with its own, according to Russ Crupnick, Analyst at NPD Group (market research institute).

Some analysts and executives from the music industry claim that this occurrence may have influenced public trust in the completely new technology. Many reports about server breakdowns of Amazon Cloud were published last month on various websites, including GroupMe.com (New York Times).

Amazon introduced its MP3 music store back in 2007. The digital music download market figures show that iTunes controls 66.2% of the market today, while Amazon can only claim 13.3%. And the Lady Gaga experiment definitely won’t help Amazon increase its market share.