Last week Amazon offered the Lady Gaga Born This Way album for just $.99 via online download and this week sales numbers for that event have been posted with the company selling 440,000 copies of the pop stars sophmore offering for a total loss of $3.2 million.
The loss comes after Amazon paid $8.39 per album to Interscope Records for the right to sell the full album in digital form.
The Amazon deal helped Gaga move 1.15 million copies of her record during the first week of release while Amazon pulled in a 38 percent share of those sales. For their part iTunes didn’t do so bad with full priced sales either, moving an estimated 200,000 copies for a 17.4% share.
Trailing behind online retailers were Best Buy with 150,000 copies sold and Walmart at 125,000. It should be noted that Best Buy was giving the album away with a Smartphone purchase, however those free album giveaways were not included in their final sales numbers.
By the end of 2010 Amazon was nearing 13.5% market share for digital music downloads and this newest deal is sure to gain the company a new audience, however they still have a long way to go before they catch up to iTunes which has a national share of more than 65 percent.
