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Buyers flooded Amazon’s website to take advantage of a pricing blunder on Thursday, when entire albums were made available for only 29p.  The Telegraph reports that at least 30 albums – by artists such as Kings of Leon, Lily Allen, Metallica, Coldplay, Bruce Springsteen, James Morrison and Norah Jones went on sale for less than the cost of a single track.

Hundreds of tracks were downloaded at a 95 per cent discount before the prices were returned to normalcy.  Many of the albums that sold for 29p, such as Lily Allen’s It’s Not Me It’s You, usually retail at £7.99. 

Customers are thought to have been taking advantage of the mistake over a four hour period before it was noticed, and it is believed by some that the spike in sales may affect the album charts.  Blogs and discount websites spread the word on the sale, no doubt increasing traffic to the site during the four hour time slot.

The website T3, for example, notified its users: “Amazon is selling a load of full albums on its MP3 store at a fraction of their normal cost in what looks distinctly like a major pricing cock-up.”

Hot UK Deals chimed in with: “Well what can I say except Amazon appears to have gone crazy.”
There was no word from Amazon on how much money was lost because of the errors, or what caused them.  The Telegraph did quote a company spokesman as saying: “We can confirm that earlier today there was a pricing error on a small number of MP3 albums. This issue has been rectified. Despite our best efforts, with the millions of items available on our website, pricing errors can occur.”