Lady Gaga supports 99 cents digital album price

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Lady GagaImage source, (C) British Broadcasting Corporation
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Lady Gaga played BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend in Carlisle in May

Lady Gaga has endorsed one digital retailer's campaign to sell her latest album for less than a dollar.

Amazon sold the singer's second album Born This Way for 99 cents on two separate occasions during its first week of release in the US.

Asked by the Wall Street Journal whether she thought her album was worth more than that Gaga said: "No, I absolutely do not."

"Especially for MP3s and digital music. It's invisible. It's in space."

Lady Gaga storms US album chart

She added: "If anything, I applaud a company like Amazon for equating the value of digital versus the physical copy, and giving the opportunity to everyone to buy music."

Yesterday (1 June) it was confirmed that Gaga's album, her first to go to number one in the US, had sold more than 1.1 million copies in its first week of release.

US magazine Billboard has reported that Amazon was understood to be responsible for around 440,000 downloads of the album which shifted 662,000 digital copies in total.

Lady Gaga's Born This Way has secured the biggest first week sales of an album since 50 Cent's The Massacre in March 2005, which sold 1,141,000 during its first seven days on sale.

In October 2010 the Official Charts Company (OCC) told Newsbeat the price of digital albums in general was "in sharp decline" but the format was taking a larger slice of the album market.

The average price had decreased to £7.05, according to the Official Charts Company.

"As a result of that there's a bit of a land-grab going on between retailers," said OCC managing director Martin Talbot at the time.

"Sometimes a retailer will take a hit on a product because it's high profile, it'll bring people into store and help them gain a benefit over competitors."

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