Lady Gaga back up on Amazon for 99 cents

In an effort to lure users to its new Cloud Drive storage service and Cloud Player, a few days ago Amazon put the digital MP3 version of Lady Gaga's new album "Born This Way" up for sale for a heavily discounted 99 cents (wholesale price on the album is reportedly $9). The promotion ended up crashing Amazon's servers briefly.

It was supposed to be a day-only sale but Amazon has the album back up 99 cents. Even if you don't like Lady Gaga, one of the benefits of downloading the album is that you get a free upgrade to the 20GB tier of Cloud Drive storage for a year. (Amazon gives you 5GB of storage for free without charging you anything extra).

The idea behind all this is to get folks to use Amazon's Cloud Drive for storing their music (and buying their music on Amazon rather than iTunes) and play it using Amazon's Cloud Player. You can also use your Amazon Cloud Drive to store photos, video files, and document files.

Obviously if Amazon can get folks to store more than 5GB on their Cloud Drives, after your free year at the 20GB tier expires, you'll start incurring fees (the yearly fee for 20GB is $20; 50GB is $50; 100GB is $100).

We expect to see additional promotions like this during the coming months as Amazon goes up against Google and Apple in the cloud-storage arena, which should be fun to watch.