Edible Apple

When it comes to a wide variety of media content, there are really only two major options out there – Amazon and Apple’s iTunes store. It’s for this reason that of all the tablet competitors that can really pose a legitimate challenge to Apple, Amazon’s rumored tablet initiative probably stands as the biggest threat in the grand scheme of things.

Recently, Amazon has been making strong promotional pushes in order to divert people’s attention away from iTunes. In late April, for instance, the digital retailing giant began offering $0.69 song downloads on all newly released tracks. The pricepoint is certain attractive measured against the $1.29 rate for new songs typically seen on iTunes. Still, Amazon’s share of the online music download market remains at about 10% and has been stuck there for several years.

So in keeping up with their efforts to buck the trend, Amazon today upped the ante by offering users Lady Gaga’s brand new album, “Born This Way”, for only $0.99. Hell, even if you marginally enjoy Lady Gaga, this is an amazing deal. Users who purchase the album are also able to get a free upgrade to 20GB of Cloud Drive storage.

The cost of the same album on iTunes is $11.99.

While it will take a lot more of these amazing deals for Amazon to strike a dent in Apple’s iTunes armor, it’s nice to see the battle for online music downloads benefiting consumers in a tangible way.