AMAZON DAILY DEAL HAS GAGA SKYROCKETING

Did Amazon MP3’s unexpected and unprecedented sale of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way for 99 cents cause the release to break the digital download record of 288k set by Coldplay’s Viva la Vida in 2008? We don’t know—at least not yet.

Not surprisingly, Amazon.com was snowed under with orders for their excusive, knocking all their servers down for a chunk of time, and causing the company to issue an apology while also assuring all those who ordered a digital copy that they’d get one. Insiders are applauding Amazon for the loss-leader move, which is seen as a way of promoting its new cloud service. SoundScan apparently will count the 99-cent downloads in its total for Gaga.

The online retail giant has yet to reveal the total number of downloads it sold Monday in its highest-profile Daily Deal ever, not even to the Wall Street Journal’s Ethan Smith. But Smith and co-writer John Kell turned to another form of measurement in their coverage this morning: the number of customer reviews posted. On Monday afternoon, when they checked the iTunes Store, which is selling the regular version at $11.99 and $15.99 for the deluxe, the reporters counted “nearly 13,000 reviews of the album's two different configurations.

Amazon users, by contrast, had posted fewer than 300 reviews, split roughly equally between favorable and unfavorable. Most of the negative reviews focused on complaints about the inability to download all 14 songs.”

Today, and presumably for the rest of the week, Amazon MP3 is selling Born This Way downloads for $6.99, still significantly undercutting iTunes.

Interscope label chief Steve Berman's thorough campaign has the record blowing out everywhere, with first-week sales estimates ranging from 750k to a high of a million. Our latest guesstimate puts the number in the neighborhood of 900k.

In other Gaga sales news, sources report that Walmart, among other brick-and-mortar retailers, violated street date by selling the album over the weekend, with estimates of more than 10k moved including non-Walmart violations, meaning the release could end up debuting on this week’s HITS Top 50 sales chart this afternoon. And Target, which was supposed to sell an exclusive version of Born This Way, won’t now because of the chain's apparent support of anti-gay marriage legislation.