Amazon Almost Giving Away Lady Gaga’s New Album

It’s not free, but it’s close: Amazon is selling digital downloads of “Born This Way,” Lady Gaga’s newest album, for 99 cents. That gets you 14 songs and a digital booklet. The same album goes for $11.99 at Apple’s iTunes, which seems more interested in pushing a 22-song special edition for $15.99–that’s the one currently featured on the retailer’s home page.

You would wonder why Amazon is giving away Lady Gaga's newest album for 99 cents. To put this in perspective, recall this quote from Steve Jobs from March.

“Recently we just crossed 200 million accounts,” Jobs told the crowd. “These are accounts with credit cards and 1-click purchasing,” he said. “Now, Amazon doesn’t publish their numbers, but it’s very likely this is the most accounts with credit cards anywhere on the Internet.”

So what Amazon has done is to get people to come to Amazon and give them their credit card numbers and enable repeat visits to be hassle free for the users and in return get Amazon repeat customers. Then look at the below stat:

On an average, an Amazon customer spends about $245 every year across all its sites. In comparison, Amazon customers were spending about $111 per year in early 2003 and about $138 in early 2006. I am of the first belief that this number is going to go up even higher as Amazon has started to add a whole different slew of services.

Now with Lady Gaga's help and 1-click, many of these new users will add $244 to the Amazon topline.

Amazon's Born This Way.