Lady Gaga’s Real First-Week Sales Are…

Pigrez reports:

We knew it! We knew our wifey could do it!

Lady Gaga’s Born This Way is set to hit the 1 million sales mark in its opening week!!

Unit sales for the album were originally predicted to be around 800,000 copies, but with Amazon’s incredible 99 cent promotion, BTW will passing the 1.15 million mark.

A-ma-zing.

Except…

Industry sources told Billboard.biz on Friday that Amazon sold some 440,000 downloads of the album — nearly all of which were the 99-cent version (a more expensive deluxe version is also available).

Subtracting that number from the grand total leaves us with slightly over 700,000 albums sold. Let’s assume that ten percent of those buyers would have still bought the album, anyway (which is generous to Gaga, given that all three of the people I know who bought the album through Amazon would never have bought it for $12). That brings us to a grand total of 750,000 albums sold.

That’s pretty damn good. But it ain’t on the level of Speak Now or Tha Carter III — to say nothing of Oops!…I Did It Again, whose wig Gaga failed to snatch.

It’s an impressive total. The next question is: will Gaga set the record for the biggest sales percentage drop from #1? Albums like this usually drop around 60-70% in their second week out. With the Amazon deal gone, a 70% drop from 750,000 is a staggering 81% drop from the inflated total of 1.15 million. Gaga had better hope that the promotional blitz she’s been on keeps her afloat. If I had to guess today, I’d say that she’ll probably end up with something like 300,000 sold in her second week — still a massive drop, but enough to keep her from garnering embarrassing headlines.