Amazon says it's ready for new Lady Gaga offer

Not disheartened, Amazon.com is giving its Lady Gaga discount another go today.

In an attempt to drum up interest in its new Cloud Drive digital music storage service, Amazon this past Monday offered Lady Gaga's new album, Born This Way, for 99 cents.

As an added bonus, anyone who caught the sale, also was upgraded to 20 GB of cloud storage, which they normally would only get by paying $20 a year or with a full-price album purchase.

The one-day sale proved to be too much for Amazon's servers and the site suffered downtime and slow downs.

But Amazon's not saying die.

Today, the company is offering the 99-cent sale again, and this time Amazon executives say they're ready for the deluge of Gaga fans.

"Clearly customers are really excited for Lady Gaga's new album," said Craig Pape, director of Music for Amazon, in a statement. "We saw extraordinary response to Monday's promotion - far above what we expected. She definitely melted some servers. So we're doing it again, and this time we're ready.

Gaga fans are taking advantage of the offer. Amazon reported that the pop singer's latest song, "Born this Way" immediately shot to number one on its bestselling MP3 albums list and has remained in the top spot since.

As of 1:30 p.m. today, Amazon had not reported any problems on the site.

Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with Yankee Group, said earlier this week that Amazon was on the right track in its efforts to pull users away from rival Apple iTunes. He added that if Amazon can do a better job in the future, Monday's glitch shouldn't be a long-term problem.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Her e-mail address is sgaudin@computerworld.com .

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