Following the recent release of Lady Gaga’s latest album, ‘Born This Way’, Amazon decided to offer their users a deal that was too good to refuse. They decided to let users download the album from the Amazon MP3 store at a price of just 99 cents. There was such a huge barrage of requests that it ended up nearly crashing their server. Users reported that the album took ages to get downloaded.

Lady Gaga has been promoting the new album prior to its iTunes release through her Twitter feed. Considering the fact that she has over 10 million followers on Twitter, the album was bound to be much in demand.

The album was available for $11.99 for the regular version and $15.99 for the deluxe version on iTunes. Compared to that, the Amazon offer was extremely reasonable and users rushed to make the best of it.

Amazon launched this special offer to popularise their recently launched Cloud Drive / Player service. To make up for the initial server slowdown due to the increased demand, which left users unable to download the full album, Amazon has offered the album at the same price again yesterday, along with 20GB of free Amazon Cloud Drive storage.

This time around, they say they are ready for the onslaught.

Born This Way reached the top of Amazon’s MP3 best selling list soon after the offer and has stayed at the top since then.

“I Gotta Feeling” was released by the band in the beginning of June last year, was at the top of the charts for 2 weeks and then continued to remain in the top 40 for a total of 33 weeks.

The Black Eyed Peas also hold the record for the maximum number of downloads by a single group – a total of 3.3 million, in the U.K.

Martin Talbot, Managing Director of The Official UK Charts Company, says that this is a very significant milestone. While the industry started recognising the importance of downloads as far back as 2005, by counting them as part of the singles charts, this is the first time that a song has actually been legally downloaded so many times.

Initially, downloads were counted only after a CD was made physically available in shops. One year later, the rules were changed, and downloads started getting counted even without a CD release.

Now, 98% of all singles’ sales are through downloads. However, according to record company executives, the easy availability of downloads is only adding to the problem of online piracy, which results in the loss of millions of pounds of revenue to the record companies every year.

While this might be mixed news to the record company, it definitely marks a continued change in the way the U.K. public consumes media. Digital definitely seems to be the way forward. The record companies need to catch up with the rest of the business world and start building a more digital media friendly business model.

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What makes this particular music release interesting is the fact that the artists eliminated the need for a major record label to promote their music and that the artist left it up to users to decide how much they wished to pay for the music they were downloading.

ComScore reported that an estimated 1.2 million visitors viewed the Radiohead site during the first 29 days of October, with a significant number downloading the album. According to their research and calculations, only 62 percent of the fans who downloaded the album did not pay for it, with the remaining 38 percent paying an average of £2.93 per download.

48 percent of downloaders from the UK paid for the album, averaging £2.47 per download. A lower percentage (40%) of US downloaders paid for the album, but they paid a higher average of £3.94 per download.

Findings from the ComScore research report have come under fire with Radiohead releasing a statement questioning the validity of the numbers. ComScore replied by defending the validity of sampling as a means of estimating numbers.

Disregarding the absolute correctness of the numbers presented in ComScore’s report, a more important finding from Rodiohead’s experiment has been the likelihood that the future of the music industry is definitely set to change, with a greater number of artists seeking ways to liberate themselves from their record labels and use the power of the Internet to broadcast their music to listeners at a fraction of the cost.