Lady GaGa brings Amazon to its knees

Today was the launch date for Born This Way, and Amazon in the US came up with a wicked ruse - why not sell the download for 99cents?

(I'll bet that made the RIAA delighted; the biggest release of the year and Amazon effectively gave it away.)

It's not worked out well for Amazon, either, according to Hypebot. So many people tried to get GaGa for pennies that its servers struggled, making what was supposed to be a showcase for Amazon's cloud music services into a bit of disaster.

Oh, and as people get pissed at Amazon, their negative reviews are hitting GaGa's rating, too:

Dozens of Gaga fans have chosen to show their displeasure by rating the experience on Amazon - and thus the new album's has dropped from 5 to 3 stars. "Either Cloudplayer is buggy for this download or is just unstable and pointless. I had to send an email to customer Service to get help downloading. And they'll get back to me within 12 hours?!? Its a download service and you can't get back to me any sooner than twelve hours?," wrote one two star reviewer.

Another user cited by Hypebot reported a three and a half hour struggle which resulted in just the booklet being downloaded.

It's early days for the Amazon cloudplayer, but not having calculated the likely demand and made sure it could cope seems a bit of a fumble. Unable to cope with the numbers? The cloudplayer was born this way.