Who knew we could learn so much about marketing from Lady Gaga? The pop star* has taught us two more lessons;
- People will still buy music if it’s really, really cheap. Billboard says that Amazon sold 440,000 digital copies of her new “Born This Way” album at $0.99 each. The e-commerce giant sold 330,000 copies on a Monday in May, even though demand for promotion blew its servers up, and 110,000 more copies a few days later (Thursday), when it repeated the stunt.
- People will still buy music if they’re really, really interested in a particular act. Billboard reported that s Lady Gaga was set to sell 1.15 million albums in the album’s first week. Which means that buyers are paying full price for some 700,000 of them.
- Bonus lesson, because we already knew it, but it’s good to remember anyway: People are still buying CDs! Billboard also projected that Apple’s iTunes will account for 200,000 units sold by the end of the first week. Add in Amazon’s totals and you get to 640,000 digital albums sold. Which means that Americans will have bought more than 500,000 good old-fashioned compact discs this week, too.
Have you bought a CD in the last year? Do you know anyone who has?
But someone is: A decade after Napster, discs still account for a majority of the music industry’s revenues.