About 30 albums, normally priced around £7.99, were on offer for 29p for four hours last night. It is believed the sales resulting from the malfunction could affect the charts after bloggers and tech sites alerted consumers to the low prices.
T3 informed its readers of what it described as a "major pricing cockup". It added: "Over 30 albums from artists including Metallica, MGMT, Abba, Coldplay, Madness, Fleetwood Mac, Placebo, Bruce Springsteen, Massive Attack and a load more are now selling on the store for just 29p each."
In response, insisted the number of albums sold during the four-hour period was small but refused to go into details about how the glitch occurred.
However, coincidentally Amazon ran a promotion earlier this year offering tracks for 29p each.
Separately Amazon has announced it is releasing the source code for its e-book reader the Kindle DX. The move opens the way for iPhone-style applications released by third-party software developers.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said he plans to split the e-book part of the business into software and hardware divisions. This will allow Amazon to continue developing ebooks for other hardware.
Kindle books can currently be