[UPDATE] Why Lady Gaga and Amazon Just ‘Get It’ Better Than You Do

Lady Gaga is known for her outrageous and eccentric attire on stage and in the public image (and just a tad bit of musical talent as well). Amazon is known for being one of the largest online stores, quality customer service, and great deals. When you put them together what do you get? A stroke of genius that proves just how much more they understand the way consumers work these days.

Mashable posted this morning that Lady Gaga is selling her new album for only 99 cents via Amazon. Amazon is also sweetening the deal by forking over 20 gigs of Cloud Drive storage per purchase. This is a major move by both the artist and vendor; rarely has an album been priced for so little, let alone the release of a brand new album from arguably the hottest artist right now (her single “Born This Way” was the fastest selling single in iTunes history). So why are Gage and Amazon charging less than a dollar for an album that millions would purchase for $10-15 dollars without hesitation? Well…

1) Simply because she can. Money isn’t an issue for Lady Gaga OR Amazon…not one album’s worth at least.

2) She understands that consumers in the present day need incentive to buy into something…but if they love, and are loyal to the person/product, they will promote it effortlessly and persuade their peers to buy into it as well. Selling an album for a dollar seems a lot less serious when you consider that Gaga has ~45 million combined fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter that are sure to pay up a dollar for her new album…and then post tweets, statuses, personal messages, and many other types of free Gaga advertising all on their own. Not a bad way to get the word out huh?

3) Amazon’s Cloud Drive is a direct competitor of Google’s and harnessing the power of 45 million Gaga fans, plus Amazon’s fans and massive email list, allows it to immediately compete and perhaps succeed against a giant like Google.

4) Gaga’s reputation as a unique, barrier-pushing artist (check out her recent SNL performance where she sported a pregnancy “bump” whilst performing “Born This Way”) is only bolstered by a bold move like this. It continues her trend as the artist doing things unlike any before her, and also sends a nice message to her fans showing that she cares about them beyond their money.

The end result of this campaign, assuming it reaches the same level of success as Gaga’s music career or Amazon’s online success, will more than make up for any losses taken from selling the album for such a low price.

This is a great strategy. It will get tons of press (I have already seen people I know sending emails and posting on Facebook about it) and allows both parties involved to gain new fans and customers. Possibly (however unlikely) it could also pave the way for a new business strategy that could help save the music industry from its ongoing troubles with pirating, torrents, and such. Now how cool would that be?

What do you think? Is Lady Gaga doing something smart, or is it another attention grabbing headline that will pass without a big deal being made of it?

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[Update]

The Amazon servers got hit so hard from the Gaga faithful that the album downloads are now delayed. As a result people are ripping the digital music service by giving the album one star ratings. I am personally having trouble figuring out if this is a measure of extreme success, or extreme failure. Obviously Lady Gaga has nothing to do with this, except making her fans way too insane so that they cause an event like this to occur. Amazon definitely has to except the blame for this…seeing as how Gaga’s following has helped her become the world’s most powerful celebrity according to Forbes.

While something like this occurring would negatively impact a campaign or business move under normal circumstances…I believe that this will be the exception. Nobody is going to not buy the album for a dollar because it will take them a little while longer to get it, and the fanbase is so gaga for Gaga that this will just create more press and draw attention to it. Lady Gaga will escape from this unharmed, if not even more formidable. Amazon may have some explaining to do, and will most likely take a PR hit, however.

Props to Gaga though for helping to crash the Amazon servers that are able to handle things like Black Friday rushes and other massive deals. It just shows you how amazing the artist really is.

I will never use Google again

This summer was when I first started really getting into all things social, beyond Facebook that is. I joined Twitter just this past June (sent my 1,000th Tweet today, btw), and signed up for LinkedIn, a host of Twitter clients, Quora (within the first few weeks of it’s beta release I believe), and many other sites that were, or still are, startups trying to get into the game even more recently than that. However, the best online discovery I made was no social tool, it was a search engine…called DuckDuckGo.

Now before you laugh at the somewhat childish nickname, go check it out. Give it one full day of trying it out and I guarantee you never go back to your previous search engine. This little engine that could emphasizes user privacy (“Google tracks you. We don’t” it claims on it’s About page), this privacy mission is explained in detail here (pictures included!), at the aptly named donttrack.us website. While promoting user privacy, it also makes searching almost too easy. How so you ask? Read on:

First, it has this little feature called Zero-click Info that gives you a snippet of information about what you’re searching for without you having to click through to a result. For example, this is what comes up when you search for James Cameron’s Avatar:

Keep playing with it and it also allows you to search things like the distance from Atlanta, GA to Columbus, OH (any cities, states, or countries will do…that’d just the route I travel most often). Why go to some website when you get this:

Next, the “Goodies” (c’mon, how can you argue against a search engine that advertises it’s ‘goodies’ on their homepage and not mean something explicit?) the site offers are incredible, and got me to switch over from Google. The !bang syntax, something I’ve never seen done on any website before, is it’s most useful feature. It allows you to search hundreds of websites directly, without wasting time going to the actual website and typing into the search bar. So, for example, imagine you want to search for…Youtube’s #1 total views leader, Lady Gaga. All you have to do is type in “!youtube lady gaga” in the search bar and you will immediately be brought to this page. Simple right?

**Helpful tip** If you’re using Google Chrome, set your default search engine to DuckDuckGo and now whenever you want to search popular sites like Youtube or Facebook, all you need to do is use the !bang syntax in your URL bar at the top of the browser and Bang! (yes, yes I did) you’re at the results in less than a second. If you ever thought that it doesn’t take much time to go to a site, find the search bar, then search the site….welcome to the world of DuckDuckGo.

The last great feature of the site is that it allows you to type in something like “Simpsons characters” and will return something actually helpful, unlike what Google will give you:

An alphabetical list of Simpson's Characters = helpful

VS.

The one true con of the site (impressive, compared to the many pros) is that it is not 100% independent yet. The image search still uses Google Images as it’s resource, and links you to the Google Images results page whenever you search for a picture. Once this site becomes fully independent and provides this service on its own (if this does ever happen, I don’t see a need right now to change anything), this site will be complete.

Give DuckDuckGo a try, I bet you’ll end up sticking with it. Let me know what you think in the comments.