Adele holds strong at #1, with Lady Gaga in hot pursuit

ArtsBeat reports: The old news about the latest music sales: Adele is No. 1, yet again. The new news: Thanks to an aggressive marketing campaign and some apparently unsolicited promotion by Amazon, Lady Gaga is selling even better than expected.

On this week’s Billboard album chart, which tracks music sales for the seven days that ended on Sunday, Adele’s 21 dominates with 138,000 copies sold in the United States. That puts her at No. 1 for a ninth time; in its 13 weeks of release in this country, it has sold 1.8 million copies. (The album is an even bigger hit in Adele’s native Great Britain, where it has sold more than two million copies.)

Threatening to upset this dominance is Lady Gaga’s Born This Way,which was released on Monday by Interscope Records. Demand for the record has, naturally, been high. And a broad marketing campaign has made Lady Gaga ubiquitous over the last week, with tie-ins through Best Buy, Starbucks, the online gaming company Zynga and other companies. In Manhattan, trains on the S subway line have been branded Born This Way top to bottom.

The album got an additional publicity boost on Monday when Amazon offered its MP3 version for 99 cents, a promotion that proved so popular it stalled the retailer’s servers. Neither Amazon nor Interscope would comment on the promotion. In a note published yesterday on The Lefsetz Letter, a widely read music industry blog, Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s manager, confirmed that Amazon’s decision to discouint the album was its own:

“Although we weren’t aware of Amazon’s deal that they were offering. I applaud them for their efforts. Any time we can get people to purchase music legally, it’s a good thing for the business."

Estimates of the success of Amazon’s promotion have varied. In an article on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal cited an anonymous music industry source as saying that the digital versions of Born This Way at Amazon and iTunes (where it was not discounted) sold a combined 250,000 to 350,000 copies on Monday; others guess lower.

But the promotion was enough for Billboard to raise its prediction for the album’s weekly sales. Three weeks ago the magazine, the most authoritative trade publication in the music industry, said that Born This Way was likely to sell somewhat less than 750,000 copies. Now, after the Amazon promotion, the magazine says that Universal Music Group, Interscope’s parent, “is officially projecting first-week sales in the range of 800,000 to 850,000 units, and less-official projections are even higher.”