Lady Gaga 99-Cent Album On Amazon

Lady Gaga fans may be some of the first to be roped into Amazon's CloudPlayer service. The online retailer giant has just begun selling the attention-hungry pop diva's latest album, Born This Way, for $0.99. Yes, the entire album of 14 songs plus a booklet all for the price you'd pay for one song from iTunes. What's the motivation behind this?

Amazon has been cut-throat with its prices in the past to compete with iTunes. Late last month, it began listing several chart toppers at only $0.69, compared to iTune's usual price of $1.29 for premium songs. But with this deal, folks who purchase the $0.99 album will also get 20GB of Cloud Drive storage. It seems pretty obvious that Amazon is using the album as a loss leader to pump up its CloudPlayer user-base.

The CloudPlayer was introduced back in March without the support of record labels and works only as a digital music locker, rather than a full music purchasing, storage, and streaming service. With Apple rumored to unveil their label-supported iTunes iCloud service at next month's WWDC developer conference, Amazon is surely attempting to reel in more of a market share while it still has a chance. Have you tried the Amazon Cloud Drive and CloudPlayer service? Or, how about Google's Music Beta?

[via Mashable]