Lady Gaga Falls to Number 2, Sales Drop Another 38%

It looks like Lady Gaga’s amazon sale really exhausted her audience. “Born this Way” sold only 105,000 in its second week. It dropped 38% from the previous week according to hitsdailydouble.com. That put it at Number 2, behind Adele’s “21” album. This is quite stunning since some Universal record execs I spoke to on Monday thought they’d hit at least 125,000. But “Born this Way” has already gone through four singles, and none of them except the title track ever got breakthrough attention. The amazon did two days of 99 cent sales, and the basic audience for Gaga bought the album–an album they would have bought anyway for $11.99. Of course, many point out that amazon paid the full wholesale fare on those albums and took the loss. But not really. Amazon scored by bringing new customers into their stores and to their Cloud service. The loser is indeed Lady Gaga and Interscope. “Born this Way” isn’t going to have “legs.” Instead of spending a year or six months on the charts, it’s headed to an eight week flameout. Meantime, the Broadway score album for “The Book of Mormon,” now the Tony winning Best Musical, came in at number 3 in its debut with 58,000 copies sold on smallish Razor & Tie. Not bad.