Amazon price cut: cock-up not an offer

It turns out that Amazon UK's 29p price promotion yesterday wasn't a loss-leader on the model of those run in the US, but some sort of error:

Amazon declined to say what had caused the blunder or how much money it had lost.

A spokesman for the company said: "We can confirm that earlier today there was a pricing error on a small number of MP3 albums.

"This issue has been rectified. Despite our best efforts, with the millions of items available on our website, pricing errors can occur."

So it was an error. Not a promotion.

Unless, of course, it was one of those "errors" designed to get people talking about Amazon's mp3 download store. The albums cut in price seem slightly random to have happened by accident; the slight loss in revenue surely more than offset by the new conversation around their offering?