It's Official: Lady Gaga's 'Born This Way' Sells 1.11 Million 
 
 By Keith Caulfield, Los Angeles 
 
 Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" album debuts at No.  Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" sold 1.11 million copies its first week in North America, according to Nielsen SoundScan, giving the pop singer the largest sales week since 2005. It's only the 17th album to sell a million in a week since SoundScan began tracking sales data in 1991, and the highest sales week since 2005. Sales of the album, launched on May 23, were helped by Amazon.com Inc., which offered a digital-download version of "Born This Way" for just 99 cents on Monday and Thursday last week. The last time we had a million-plus frame was when Taylor Swift's "Speak Now" premiered at No. Amazon paid the album's full wholesale cost, about $9, to the singer's record company, Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, and absorbed the cost. The low price drew attention, created technical problems and helped sell an estimated 440,000 downloads, according to an estimate posted on the website of trade magazine Billboard.
– Lady Gaga's new album Born This Way has zoomed to mega-hit status with sales of 1.11 million copies in its first week, making it the hottest-selling debut for an album since 50 Cent's The Massacre in 2005, according to Billboard. Only 17 albums in the last 20 years have hit a million in their first week of sales, although Gaga had a huge boost from an Amazon promotion, notes the Wall Street Journal. Amazon, in a bid to draw attention to its new Cloud Drive online storage service, offered downloads of the album for just 99 cents twice last week. The money-losing promotion helped sell an estimated 440,000 copies of Born This Way, crashing Amazon's servers in the process. The total number of downloads from all digital retailers was a record-breaking 662,000.