Are Lady Gaga followers Apple or Android fans? Amazon is using the flamboyant celebrity to push its cloud storage option, selling the singer’s new “Born This Way” album for only 99 cents. Along the way, the Internet retailer hopes you’ll pick it over Apple’s $16 iTunes price … and in doing so, be locked into using their Cloud Locker service instead of Apple’s forthcoming iCloud.
To further entice Gaga fans, Amazon is quadrupling your free storage from 5GB to 20GB. Although the Seattle-based Kindle maker announced earlier, this latest move obviously signals it is concerned about Apple impending cloud-based service. Apple reportedly will use the June WWDC to unveil iCloud.
The use of Lady Gaga by Amazon appears to take a page from Apple’s playbook of endorsements by high-profile celebrities. It’s uncertain whether the bookseller can steal the ‘coolness’ factor from a tech firm so closely linked with Hollywood. The singer, however, seems to be a hot pitchman for Silicon Valley. GaGa has also appeared promoting Google’s Chrome browser.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
17 responses to “Amazon Hoping You’ll Go ‘Gaga’ And Skip The iCloud With New $0.99 Promo”
Are you really “locked into the Amazon Cloud Player” if you buy this album? I’ve bought Amazon MP3s before and they import into iTunes without an issue. There is no “iCloud” at the moment, so if web-based access to your music is important, then there is no competition. If you just want MP3s to put on a player, this is a excellent deal. I don’t really see what it’s got to do with Apple.
 it looks like it is not even working correctly. There are many reviews saying they are only getting one or two songs.
They just give you the storage so you can listen to it anywhere. You can still import to iTunes as you always could.
I started out buy all my music from Amazon. It is cheaper and easy to import to iTunes. I found out that most albums are 80% of the cost and a LOT of albums are $5 which is about 30-40% of the cost in iTunes
Free market capitalism wins in my book
 Neither Amazon nor Apple sells digital music in my country, so thumbs down for both of them :D
I would preferÂ
 I don’t even listen to Lady GaGa, but I purchased this album because the price was unbelievable an my wife listens to her music.  However, the first song already failed to download.  Let’s see what the rest do…
Total bust! I’ve only received ONE song and three out of remaining 13 to download have returned:
Download failed. Retry download; if problem persists contact customer service
Can’t connect. Check your internet connection and retry download.
There’s nothing wrong with my internet connection. The problem is strictly Amazon did not have the server hardware to handle this type of promo.
Oh! And there goes error number four:
Download failed. Retry download; if problem persists contact customer service
Or better yet, pay the full price and get it instantly on iTunes! Grrrr!
 Gee — what a surprise — everybody likes something for free. So now, 12 million people (probably more) are simultaneously trying to download exactly the same thing from Amazon’s servers, and they can’t handle it, resulting in pissed customers. Couldn’t somebody at Amazon have predicted this outcome?
its taking ages, so much so i have given up, icloud here i come
I actually got mine no problem. It was quick and easy. Maybe something that would help is if you save it to the cloud first.