Lady Gaga marketing at monster heights

The release of a pop star's album usually comes with the typical cross-marketing splash -- strategic magazine covers, a few major TV appearances, and perhaps a cosmetics or fashion deal to remind the public a new project awaits.

Yet the social media-powered blitz connected to last week's drop of Lady Gaga's third album, "Born This Way," is bordering on epic, with partnerships ranging from Starbucks to FarmVille, and virtual giveaways of the album's 17 tracks, The Associated Press reports. It also represents the kind of bold, new business model that could help rejuvenate a deflated music industry.

Gaga already had a slew of magazine covers, from Rolling Stone to Vogue, and appeared on every high-profile show, from Oprah Winfrey to "American Idol" to "Saturday Night Live," as well as her own HBO concert special.

But she hasn't stopped there. Starbucks -- typically home to easy-on-the-ears artists such as Emmylou Harris -- is selling her album as well as launching a "digital scavenger hunt" for Gaga-inspired goods; Google Chrome debuted a commercial with Gaga with a track from the album; the online fashion outlet Gilt Groupe partnered with Gaga to offer Gaga-inspired clothing and VIP performances; Best Buy is giving away the album to anyone who purchases a mobile phone with a contract; and Zynga, creator of the popular online game "FarmVille," created "GagaVille," which offered access to exclusive Gaga songs.

And as if that wasn't enough, Amazon.com sold "Born This Way" for just 99 cents on Monday as a promotion for its new music cloud service, creating a demand so strong that the online retailing giant's servers were disrupted for a time.

And it looks like the campaigns are paying off: Gaga's album is estimated to sell anywhere between a half-million to a million copies when the top album charts are revealed this week.

"It was really about expanding the distribution on this album and going into as many nontraditional retail partnerships and nontraditional marketing partnerships as possible," Gaga's manager, Troy Carter, told The Associated Press. "Just with the diminishing music labels, you want to find quality partners where you know you can reach new audiences and being able to push boundaries as well."

In pop history, there have been plenty of attention-grabbing publicity campaigns for debuting albums, such as the huge statues of Michael Jackson placed across the world for his "HIStory" album.

Bill Werde, editorial director of Billboard magazine, calls Gaga's promotional efforts "more of a landmark campaign" for the new music industry. "There's nothing about Gaga that's subtle, so I don't see why her marketing campaign would be any different," he added.

But Carter says the unique marketing tools used leading up to and during the album's release wasn't just to achieve monster sales for the album's debut.

"Nobody ever pays attention in the second week," he said. "For us it's about being in this album cycle for the next 18 to 24 months."