After Lady Gaga's Amazon Success, Should All Albums Cost 99 Cents?

Last week, Lady Gaga's new album Born This Way sold a monstrous (by today's standards, anyway) 1.15 million copies. That platinum status came partially thanks to Amazon, which offered her album for a dirt-cheap 99 cents, and, after its servers crashed from demand, sold roughly 440,000 digital copies. Undoubtedly, what consumers love more than a Lady Gaga album is a Lady Gaga album that only costs 99 cents.

Does this give credence to a theory that says albums, like singles, should only cost a buck? According to Rob Dickens, who headed up Warner Music in the UK for more than a decade, album prices ought to be "radically" cut -- to around £1 ($1.50). Dickens introduced the controversial theory in October at The City music conference, where he urged record labels to combat piracy and boost sales by making albums as much of an impulse buy as a single is today. Reducing album prices, he said, would ignite a boom in sales: Dickens predicted that major albums could sell as many as 200 million copies. Now Gaga herself is throwing more fuel on that argument. When asked whether she thought her album was worth more than 99 cents, the pop star told the The Wall Street Journal, "No, I absolutely do not, especially for MP3s and digital music." "It’s invisible. It’s in space," she added. "If anything, I applaud a company like Amazon for equating the value of digital versus the physical copy, and giving the opportunity to everyone to buy music." Still, as Gaga pointed out, her album wasn't actually 99 cents--the sales price was supplemented by Amazon. Hence, the 99-cent offering wasn't so much a promotion for Gaga as it was for Amazon, which was showing off its cloud music service