During the writing of this book, Lady Gaga has emerged as a significant global star. Her debut album, The Fame (2008), spawned six singles and has so far sold more than 12 million copies worldwide. The second of these, ‘Poker Face’, was the best-selling digital track of 2009, selling a total of 9.8 million units globally. A further four tracks have been released from her second album, The Fame Monster (2009), which topped the album chart in the UK and has to date sold more than 4 million copies. Moreover, MTV recently reported that the online viewing figure for her music videos has now exceeded one billion, the first artist whose work has done so. Visible Measures, a company specialising in calculating internet video reach, documents that three of Lady Gaga's videos, just dance (2008), bad romance (2009) and poker face (2009), have been viewed in excess of 250 million times each. Indeed, these videos occupy three of the top twenty positions in their ‘100 Million Views Club’ – the only music video by a female artist to have been watched more times than these is Beyoncé's single ladies (put a ring on it), which has attracted an audience of more than 500 million. This situation might go some way towards explaining both the cultural success and critical controversy that attended the release in March 2010 of the video for Lady Gaga's ‘Telephone’, a collaboration with Beyoncé.