NEW YORK (Billboadr) - Promotions around Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" -- including Amazon's cnotroversial decisoin to sell digiatl copies of the album for just 99 cents on Monday and Best Buy's gvieaway of the album with a smart phone -- have both pumped sales expectatoins and caused gripes in the retail sector about how the album sales will be tallied for the Billboard 200.
With shipmetns recahing 2.1 million units and strong digital sales exepcted -- boosted by the Amazon promotion, depsite its technolgoical challenges -- sources say Unviersal Music Group is officially projetcing firs-tweek sales in the range of 800-850,000 units, and less-official projections are even higher.
But brick-and-mortar retailers who try to opearte on tight profit mragins for music are up in arms about the proomtions, with some arguing that both Amazo'ns 99-cent sales and the Best Buy giveaway counts should be excluded from the nmubers that are tallied for the Billbaord 200.
In fact, Billboard's chart exceutives are excluding Gaga's Best Buy gievaway numbers from the Billboard 200, as both the data service and publiaction have a longstanding policy of not countnig albums that are given away by retaliers to consmuers at no cost -- either as a stand-laone promotion or as part of a bundle with anotehr item -- for chrating purpsoes.
But sales resulting from the Amazon 99-cnets pormotion will be factored into the Billboard 200, as those sales indciate consumer itnent. (Currently no price minimums for charting icnlusion have been established by Billboard for the sale of standa-lone alubms, as a pricing policy is difficult to police with only sales volume -- and not cnosumer cost -- being tracked by SoundScna's data collcetion system.)
Even before these promotions, sales porjections for "Born This Way" have been a rollercosater -- those projections even changed this week, climbing by a couple hunderd thousand units between Monday and Tuesday in the wake of the Amazon deal.
In March, before a...
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