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Re: Lady GaGa Thread
http://www.undercover.fm/news/14923-lad … number-one
Lady Gaga Cheats Her Way To Number One
By Paul Cashmere
Mon, 30 May 2011
Lady Gaga is almost certain to sell more than 1 million copies of ‘Born This Way’ after Amazon put downloads of the album on sale for 99 cents for two days last week but many in the industry are calling it cheating.
Now, despite earlier predictions that it would fall short of the 1 million sales mark, ‘Born This Way’ is expected to pass the million mark easy and now beat Taylor Swift’s ‘Speak Now’ album that did 1.04 million in the first week late last year because of the 99 cent sale.
The Amazon move has angered a lot of industry peeps who do not consider the Gaga figure legitimate and worthy of chart inclusion.
Amazon ended up selling around half of all sales for the album in the past week including 330,000 on day one and 150,000 on day two.
Best Buy went one better. You got ‘Born This Way’ for free with every smart phone sold.
Billboard has decided to allow the 99 cent sales of ‘Born This Way’ from Amazon to count towards the chart but will not count sales from Best Buy’s smart phone deal.
The standard version of the album retails for $12.99 in America. A deluxe addition with 10 extra tracks retails for $21.98. The list price for the digital download version is $11.99.
Re: Lady GaGa Thread
It isn't cheating. Artists have to adapt to the changing times and think of new ways to move product. Its no different than bands using video games to sell albums/songs. Soundgarden's Black Rain charted higher than any of CD's singles on Itunes and its only promotion was that video game and a couple live performances. Their hits album Telephantasm immediately went platinum due to the same thing.
The days of sitting back watching your album go number one because its got a cool cover, one good song,etc. are over. To quote Rocky Balboa, "You do whatcha gotta do".
Re: Lady GaGa Thread
I wouldn't call it cheating, but it's tough to compare sales of an album that sold for $9.99 to one that sold for $0.99. Maybe the record industry should adopt the movie industry's way of tabulating what a movie/CD grosses, more than tickets/copies sold. I'd venture to guess Taylor Swift's sales accounted for a lot more than Lady Gaga. So cheating might not be the right word, but it's not really a fair comparison.
- monkeychow
- Rep: 661
Re: Lady GaGa Thread
Yeah...consider it's a chart ranking artists against one another...and the aim is to be able to claim you sold the most RELATIVE to everyone else....not just to move product for the sake of it....
Take this hypothetical....
#1 - 150,000 ablums at $0.99c
#2 - 100,000 Albums at $10.00
#3 - 90,000 Albums at $10.00
#4 - 75,000 Albums at $10.00
Person at #1 can now claim to have a #1 album, and that they ranked #1 on the first weekend ahead of everything else, when the low price is clearly manipulating the figures.
I'm not saying the lady gaga table would be that bad, and I'm sure she'll sell a bucket regardless, but I can also totally see why industry people who sold their products at full price see including figures from a price cut of that nature to be an unfair manipulatuion of the charting system.
Re: Lady GaGa Thread
Is her latest album "good" though? I liked some of her earlier work, but haven't been too impressed with what I've heard so far of the new stuff. And I tried to watch some of that HBO Monster's Ball concert, and that was downright awful. If there was ever any chance of me going to see her live (there never was one really), there certainly isn't one now.
And I'm not talking about her performance really, it's her interaction with her fans and her fans themselves. I couldn't handle that in a live setting.
