Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” arrives atop the Billboard 200 Albums Chart as her latest album manages to sell 1,108,000 copies in the week of it’s release, the largest weekly total by any album since 50 Cent’s “The Massacre” sold 1,114,000 copies on the week of its release in March 2005.

“Born This Way” becomes GaGa’s first #1 on the albums chart. “The Fame” peaked at #2, and its extended version “Fame Monster” peaked at #5.

Lady GaGa is the most recent million seller, right after Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now” did it with 1,047,000 copies in October 2010. Curiously, Swift’s and GaGa’s albums share a similar strategy which didn’t help Swift much: Both had their albums discounted on Amazon.com for bigger first week sales ($ 0.99 for Gaga, and $ 3.99 for Swift). 440,000 copies of “Born This Way” were sold via the $ 0.99 HUGE discount, while only 40,000 of Swift’s total were off her discount back in October.

With such front-loaded digital sales from Amazon due to the super huge discount, “Born This Way” breaks the record for biggest digital debut of any album, with over 600,000 copies out of the albums 1,1 million coming from digital retailers, with Amazon contributing with almost half a million.

Lady GaGa’s new set becomes the 2nd biggest female first week sales in the history of the chart, after only Pop superstar Britney Spears whose album “Oops!…I Did It Again” sold 1,319,000 copies during its release week in 2000.

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Lady GaGa signed copies of “Born This Way” in at the Best Buy store at Union Square in New York City on Monday (May 22). GaGa spent more than 5 hours signing copies for fans only leaving when the store closed. Photo of her at the store above.

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