Lady Gaga is coming under fire for a new Twitter campaign, urging her ‘little monsters’ to buy multiple copies of her new single, ‘Applause‘ (listen to it here), on iTunes, and sending in pictures of the receipt for a chance to win an all expense paid trip to her performance at London’s iTunes Festival. Examiner is reporting that some fans are spending upwards of $300 on entries in attempts to win the contest.
The thought of little girls buying hundreds of the same song on iTunes in an attempt to win these tickets, Willy Wonka style, is kind of hilarious. At least Charlie and the kids got some chocolate bars out of it – these ‘monsters’ are buying digital copies of a song. I can imagine some little Veruca Salt setting up a factory of workers, sitting behind iTunes screens buying ‘Applause’ over, and over, and over.
Examiner goes onto accuse Gaga of doing this to help drive up sales of her album….well, no shit. They compared it to the release of Gaga’s album Born This Way, which didn’t sell up to expectations and saw a price drop to 99 cents, pushing the album to the top of the charts. In response, Billboard stopped counting album sales for albums priced at under 3 dollars.
Note: Examiner seems to have a lot of beef with Lady Gaga, and a lot of love for Katy Perry. There are multiple references to Perry’s superiority to Gaga throughout the article, and there is no real source for “Lady Gaga fans spending upwards of $300″, so who knows what the fuck this website’s talking about. Either way, getting little kids to buy your song multiple times, in order to win a contest that they have only a fraction of a chance of winning, is a douchey move.