As many of you have probably noticed, clouds are all the rage these days in the tech world, Apple’s new iCloud being the most recent push up into the air by a major tech corporation. You may also remember Microsoft’s “To the Cloud” commercials. Well, Amazon also has a cloud of its own–it is called the Cloud Drive Service, which allows users to store music files on remote servers and stream them over the Internet to their computer or smartphone. It has served as Amazon’s latest attempt to grab users away from iTunes. Amazon often offers one-day promotions on albums, selling them for $4 or $5 dollars. This time, in a deliberate marketing attempt to promote the Cloud Drive Service, Amazon put Lady Gaga’s album, “Born This Way”, on sale for just $0.99. For those of you counting at home, that is a full $ fewer than the price of the album on iTunes. However, not everything went as planned for Amazon. The fine folks at Amazon must have underestimated the thriftiness/craziness of Gaga fans, and, by every afternoon, the number of requests to download the album stalled the company’s servers. Many were unable to listen to the entire album or even download the album at all. As unhappy internet users always seem to do, they took to the comments section and other online outlets to complain about and, for the most part, bash Amazon. So, overall, it seems like this promotion failed, right? Well, depends on how you look at it. Yes, the server stalled; yes, people were furious at Amazon and praised iTunes; yes, Amazon lost a total of 3.2 million dollars due to this 99 cent promotion. On the other hand, though, Amazon sold about 440,000 downloads of the album. And, as a promotional device, the sale did wonders to get the word out about Amazon’s music service. Did you know that Amazon has had this music service since 2007? Probably not. In fact, I am sure many of you are hearing about this new, cheap music service for the first (or second…) time. The importance of this promotion was the increased traffic to the site and the awareness of the site. In a world with more and more technological clouds (especially music-based ones), Amazon needed to get its name out there. It did. I must say though, I will stick to iTunes.
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