Lady Gaga's handlers likely did a spit-take when the pop star told a reporter that her new album "Born This Way" wasn't worth more 99-cents. That, of course, is how much the album sold to 440,000 of the 1.1 million purchasers of the album, all due to Amazon's one-day digital-only deal.

"For mp3s and digital music, it's invisible. It's in space. If anything, I applaud a company like Amazon for...giving the opportunity to everyone to buy music," she told the Wall Street Journal. For industry insiders, another spit-take was occurring simultaneously: the New York Times calculated that Amazon took something like a $3 million hit when it went through with the deal.

While "Born This Way" sold for less than a dollar on the site, Amazon actually paid the distributor somewhere between $8 to $9 for each unit. That may have been a drop in the bucket to the digital retailer, who is pushing its new Cloud Drive technology.