Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Amazon Tries a Lady Gaga Do-Over: “This Time, We’re Ready”

On Monday, Amazon tried to have a Lady Gaga sale, and failed: Demand for her new album, priced at $0.99, swamped the retailer’s infrastructure.

Today, Amazon is trying a do-over. “This time, we’re ready,” the store promises via Twitter.

I bet they will be, but I also bet it won’t matter: Demand for big new albums tends to drop off immediately after they come out, and my hunch is that everyone who had to have “Born This Way” has already got “Born This Way.”

Earlier this week an industry source told The Wall Street Journal that Amazon and Apple’s iTunes had collectively sold between 250,000 and 350,000 copies on Monday.

It’s still important for Amazon to try this again, though. The real point of the promotion was to promote the company’s new cloud music service–anyone who bought the album got an extra 15 gigs of storage in Amazon’s locker for free.

And the fact that Amazon’s servers couldn’t keep up with demand is a sort of anti-promotion. Definitely worth taking a mulligan on this one.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”