Lady Gaga ‘Born This Way’ 99-cent sale has fans going gaga

Lady Gaga 'Born This Way' posted a massive sales record of 1.11 million copies sold this week, the largest in six years, Nielsen SoundScan reported today.

The huge number was fueled by the 99-cent sale via digital download by online retailer Amazon Inc. Fans quickly bought their discounted copies on Monday and Thursday. Billboard reported that up to 440,000 downloads were made on Amazon during the week, roughly twice the copies sold in Apple's iTunes Store.

Due to strong demand for Lady Gaga 'Born This Way', Amazon suffered some technical problems during the first day of the sale. It apologized to customers and offered the same 99-cent deal three days later.

Amazon's sale was meant to feature its new Cloud Drive online service. Rival Apple Inc. is also set to unveil next week its own online storage service called iCloud which is believed to offer better features than Amazon's offering because of exclusive deals with three recording labels.

Lady Gaga 'Born This Way' album is available from Apple at the price of $11.99, with an expanded version sold at a higher price. The full cost of the album is $9 according to Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group but Amazon absorbed the cost to push its promo.

According to Nielsen SoundScan, the Lady Gaga 'Born This Way' album is only the 17th album to breach the one-million mark in sales since it began tracking such figures in 1991.

The last recording artist who accomplished the feat was Taylor Swift, whose 'Speak Now' album sold 1.05 million copies in November last year. Lady Gaga 'Born This Way' was the largest one-week seller since rapper 50 Cent's 'The Massacre' album sold 1.14 million records in 2005.