Lady Gaga's latest album ARTPOP has generally been considered something of a disappointment, especially when you consider the impact that its predecessor Born This Way had on the pop music landscape. Now reports are emerging from the US that such were the poor sales, it lost her label Interscope in the region of $25 million which has forced the company into numerous staff lay-offs.
US outlet Billboard has referenced the rumours, stating that even though ARTPOP shifted around 258,000 copies in its first week in the US, this was still significantly below what Interscope was expecting, allegedly forcing them to into redundancies.
However, Gaga herself has rejected this notion on her Little Monsters website. Writing there, she said that there is "no truth to many of your comments, including the 25 million dollars deficit."
She added: "I have lost love (sic) ones to the greed of money. It is not Interscope. They in fact love me very much and will see ARTPOP to the end."
So, a pretty stringent rebuttal there from Gaga but it does beg the questions: can there be this much smoke without fire? And, if Interscope was indeed forced into lay-offs, would they really inform Lady Gaga about this and risk driving a wedge in their business relationship? This remains to be seen but we do suspect that there is something afoot here.
