Amazon's Lady Gaga album sale swamps servers

Amazon's servers stalled afterwards many Lady Gaga fans tried to take advantage of its surprise 99-cent, one-day sale of the MP3 version of her new album, "Born This Way." In a blow for cloud computing, many users were unable to download or listen to the album at length.

Paragon of pop ambition

Lady Gaga has made herself a paragon of pop ambition and a spokeswoman for equal rights, however Monday she became an unwitting symbol for something else: the pitfalls of cloud computing.

"Born This Way", her new album, arrived with a blitz of marketing. Amazon.com surprised the singer's fans by offering a one-day sale of the MP3 version of the album for 99 cents, a full $11 less than its price at Apple's iTunes, the Web's dominant music retailer.

The discount

The discount was widely seen as a way for Seattle-based Amazon to promote its new Cloud Drive service, which allows users to store music files on remote servers and stream them over the Internet to their computer or smartphone.

Most music companies see cloud services — which promise that all your music will be available on all your devices at any time — as the then and there frontier for the industry. And for the retailers and innovation companies that will operate them, such services have become an important battleground.

"What Amazon is trying to do is build up as much share as possible earlier Apple comes in," said Russ Crupnick, an analyst with market researcher NPD Group.

Fatal flaw that this happened

"It's maybe not a fatal flaw that this happened, nevertheless it undoubtedly creates a challenge for them," said Matthew Eastwood, an analyst at IDC, a firm that researches innovation. "There is not a lot of forgiveness for things like this in the market. People will tend to move on and find other suppliers."