Amazon says it's ready for new Lady Gaga offer

Computerworld - 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 bought the specially priced album was upgraded to 20GB of cloud storage, which is normally available for $20 a year or through the purchase of a full-price album.

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

But Amazon isn't giving up.

The company is offering the 99-cent deal again today, 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 at 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 Born this Way immediately shot to No. 1 on its list of bestselling MP3 albums 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 at Yankee Group, said earlier this week that Amazon was on the right track in its efforts to pull users away from Apple's rival service, 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 email address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.

Read more about E-business in Computerworld's E-business Topic Center.