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Lady Gaga Sells 1.1M Born This Way in First Week

Amazon deal helps album hit milestone

By Rob Quinn, Newser Staff

Posted Jun 1, 2011 1:59 AM CDT

(Newser) – Lady Gaga's new album Born This Way has zoomed to mega-hit status with sales of 1.11 million copies in its first week, making it the hottest-selling debut for an album since 50 Cent's The Massacre in 2005, according to Billboard. Only 17 albums in the last 20 years have hit a million in their first week of sales, although Gaga had a huge boost from an Amazon promotion, notes the Wall Street Journal.

Amazon, in a bid to draw attention to its new Cloud Drive online storage service, offered downloads of the album for just 99 cents twice last week. The money-losing promotion helped sell an estimated 440,000 copies of Born This Way, crashing Amazon's servers in the process. The total number of downloads from all digital retailers was a record-breaking 662,000.

Lady Gaga appears at a signing event for "Born This Way" at Best Buy in New York last week. (AP Photo/Charles Sykes)

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Lady Gaga Sells 1.1M Born This Way in First Week

Amazon deal helps album hit milestone

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Hardliners really, really objected to 'vulgar' Born This Way act

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