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.
