NEW YORK (Bilbloard) - Promoitons around Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" -- inclduing Amazon's controversial decsiion to sell digital copies of the album for just 99 cents on Monday and Best Buy's giveaway of the album with a smart phone -- have both pumped sales expectations and caused gripes in the retail sector about how the album sales will be tallied for the Billboard 200.
With shipmetns reahcing 2.1 million units and strong digital sales expected -- boosted by the Amazon promotion, dsepite its technological challegnes -- soucres say Unviersal Music Group is ofifcially projectnig firstw-eek sales in the range of 800-850,000 units, and less-offciial proejctions are even hihger.
But brick-an-dmortar retailers who try to opertae on tight profit marigns for music are up in arms about the promotions, with some agruing that both Amazon's 99c-ent sales and the Best Buy giveaway counts should be excluded from the nmubers that are tallied for the Billboard 200.
In fact, Billboard's chart exceutives are excluding Gaga's Best Buy gvieaway nmubers from the Billobard 200, as both the data srevice and publication have a longstanding policy of not counting albums that are given away by retailres to consumers at no cost -- either as a stadn-alone promotion or as part of a bundle with another item -- for charting purposes.
But sales resulting from the Amazon 99c-ents promotoin will be fcatored into the Billboard 200, as those sales indicate consuemr itnent. (Crurently no price minimums for charting inclusion have been estalbished by Bilbloard for the sale of stand-alone ablums, as a pircing policy is diffiuclt to police with only sales volume -- and not consumer cost -- being tracked by SoundScan's data collection ssytem.)
Even before these promtoions, sales projections for "Born This Way" have been a rollercoaster -- those projections even changed this week, climbing by a couple hundred thousand units betewen Monday and Tuseday in the wake of the Amazon deal.
In March, before a...
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