From the Amazon newswire this morning:
SEATTLE, May 26, 2011 — Amazon.com today announced it will offer a repeat of Monday’s blockbuster Gold Box Deal of the Day: customers can purchase the Lady Gaga “Born This Way” MP3 album today for $0.99. Upon release, the album immediately shot to number one on Amazon’s bestselling MP3 albums list and has remained in the top spot since.
“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,” said Craig Pape, director of Music for Amazon. “So we’re doing it again, and this time we’re ready. We’re pleased to offer ‘Born This Way’ – the whole album – for $0.99 today only. Along with this purchase, customers get 20 GB of free Amazon Cloud Drive storage so they can store and play their music anywhere. If you missed it the first time, don’t miss it today.”
Amazon MP3 customers can save their newly purchased albums to Amazon Cloud Drive, allowing them to play their music anywhere, store it for free and download it to any PC, Mac or Android device using Amazon Cloud Player. All Cloud Drive users start with 5 GB of free Cloud Drive storage, and customers are upgraded to 20 GB of free storage with the purchase of any album, including “Born This Way” at just $0.99.
Amazon MP3 frequently features popular new release albums for under $6 and offers a free song of the day, yet they haven’t been able to gain much traction on the powerhouse iTunes Store. Convenience and ease of use seem to win out over saving a couple of dollars. But I’d be willing to bet that 99 cents is enough to get the attention of many Little Monsters (Gaga fans). And rightly so, considering many already have an Amazon account ready to go, and Amazon MP3 isn’t an “iTunes killer” at all, but works very well alongside. I use and dig both.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon is running this offer again not so much for customer satisfaction, but also to draw a little extra blood from the giant while they can. From a customer’s perspective, bring it on! Competition is good. From a record label perspective, we’ve had music on Amazon MP3 that sells… well, we can only figure that customers don’t expect it to be there. But compared to other non-iTunes retailers, they are nearly as transparent and easy to access as Apple. So we definitely wouldn’t mind throwing more support their way for those fans who just don’t like iTunes for whatever reason.
But we’re also very-much liking Bandcamp and Vibedeck. And if they ever get their label-level accounts ready to rock, we’ll be there.