Being able to buy Lady Gaga's Born This Way for just 99 cents last week was good news for fans—well, in theory, anyway. Right up until a surge in downloads caused a woefully unprepared Amazon to crash.
Let this be a lesson to future digital retailers: do not underestimate the eager zeal of a Little Monster.
So did the online blackout botch Lady Gaga's chance at a No. 1 album or was Amazon's profit loss Mother Monster's sales gain?
Well, what do you think?
What Amazon lacked in backup servers it made up for with its unbeatably deep discount and undoubtedly helped propel Lady Gaga to the top of the album charts.
Final sales figures for her first week out not only reached an impressive 1.1 million copies, but set a new digital sales record (just think what would have happened if Amazon's overload hadn't suffered delays).
Want more stats? We got 'em: Born This Way is the 17th album ever to sell one million copies its first week out, is the top-selling digital debut ever, moving 662,000 digital copies (Amazon accounted for a whopping 440,000 of those), and made Gaga just the fifth female artist to sell more than one million copies in its debut week—the last one was Taylor Swift's Speak Now, released last year.
In the grand scheme of things, you'd have to go back all the way to March 2005 to find a debut that came closest to matching Gaga, when 50 Cent released The Massacre to 1.14 million copies.
For someone who never fit in, she sure has made a lot of friends.