Lady Gaga’s highly anticipated new release, ‘Born this Way’, could just break several sales records as projected by Billboard. The final sales figures in the US isn’t out yet – not until Wednesday – but the album is in a good position to topple Taylor Swift’s and even N*Sync’s records.

After moving 500,000 copies on its first day of release, ‘Born this Way’ could easily dethrone N*Sync’s ‘Celebrity’ release, for having the biggest opening week after moving 1.88 million copies on its first week on the shelves back in 2001. In fact, with the rate Gaga’s album is selling, it could also outsell Taylor Swift’s ‘Speak Now’, which posted a record of 1,047,000 copies sold upon its release last fall. Billboard projects ‘Born this Way’ to sell 1.15 million copies, and after hitting almost half of its projected goal on its opening day alone, Swift’s third album might soon concede to Lady Gaga’s own third release.

Indeed, ‘Born this Way’ is posting very impressive sales numbers, after all, Amazon priced the album at only 99 cents apiece during the first two days it surfaced in the market, resulting to 330,000 copies of the album being sold. Add to that the 104,000 copies sold via iTunes, 35,000 copies of the album’s physical format sold through Target, plus the 45,000 CDs sold via Best Buy, however, Billboard may not include that last parameter as part of the album’s stats as some copies were given away as a freebie bundled with every Smartphone purchase. Another significant factor that helped boost the album’s sales is its availability even in non-traditional outlets such as CVS, Walgreens, Whole Foods and in more than 20,000 other non-media retailers nationwide.

Across the pond, ‘Born this Way’ also dominated the UK charts by moving 215,000 copies on its first day of release on Sunday. It posted the biggest first week sales in the UK for the year, after all, the record’s figures is far greater than the combined sales of all the other albums in the country’s top 10 charts.

In her passion and pursuit to constantly surprise, amaze and entertain her fans, or ‘Little Monsters’ as she calls them, Lady Gaga says that her Monster Ball tour, which backed up her sophomore set ‘The Fame Monster’, caused her a lot, so much it left her millions of dollars worth of debt.

In an interview with The Financial Times, she says, “I put everything in the show, and I actually went bankrupt after the first extension of The Monster Ball.” Her strive to perfect every show through constant and frequent format, design or concept changes had cost her more than what she had earned in the last few years since she became a household name.

“And it was funny because I didn’t know! And I remember I called everybody and said, ‘Why is everyone saying I have no money? This is ridiculous, I have five number one singles’ – and they said, ‘Well, you’re three million dollars in debt,’” the ‘Born this Way’ and ‘Judas’ singer adds.

But she shrugs it off, saying the deal is no biggie. “It’s honestly true that money means nothing to me. The only big things I’ve purchased are my dad’s heart valve and a Rolls-Royce for my parents, for their anniversary. And that was only because my dad had a Lady Gaga license plate on our old car and it was making me crazy because he was getting followed everywhere, so I bought him a new car.”

Of course now that her third studio release, ‘Born this Way’, is breaking sales records all over the world, plus the sold-out shows she has played over the past year which translated to millions of dollars worth of income, and add to that another huge paycheck from HBO after the cable channel acquired the rights to her Madison Square Garden gig, the 25-year old chart topper is back in the black again. If she goes on tour for her new album and her fickle nature would get the best of her, she’d have all the luxury and means to make even the tiniest revisions to every show, at least till her finances dwindle in the red again.

“When I am not onstage I feel dead,” this is what Grammy Award winning singer Lady Gaga tells Rolling Stone in its latest issue that is set to come out on May 27.

“I don’t feel alive unless I’m performing and that’s just the way I was born,” she adds. While that may be true, the constant need to perform and be appreciated onstage might also be a result of the singer’s very difficult life before she became famous, especially around her skeptics and detractors who ridiculed her non-stop for her looks and style, and her high school classmates who bullied her interests.

“Being myself in public was very difficult. I was being poked and probed and people would actually touch me and touch my clothes and be like, ‘What the f*** is that,’ just so awful. It was like I was being bullied by music lovers, because they couldn’t possibly believe that I was genuine,” Gaga shared. Indeed, starting out in the flimsy and fickle entertainment business is tough for someone whose musical vision is too theatrical and creative for people with conventional tastes.

And because of the ridicule the 25-year old singer experienced in school, there were times when she‘d rather be at home or somewhere else other than school, just so she wouldn’t have to put up with taunts calling out her nose, her appearance, her laugh and her passion for music, theatre and heavy, dramatic make-up.

But that’s all in the past now. Today, many consider Gaga as a valuable commodity in show business. After a well-received appearance, along with guest host Justin Timberlake, in the season finale of ‘Saturday Night Live’ over the weekend and gathering 10 million of her most loyal ‘little monsters’ in Twitter, a first for the social networking site, Forbes just named her as the industry’s most powerful, according to their Top 100 Celebrities list, which they released last week.

According to Forbes, “Gaga is there not just because of the $90 million she earned with a monster tour, but also because of her 32 million Facebook fans and 10 million Twitter followers–aka Little Monsters–who helped move 1 million digital downloads of her recent single “Born This Way” in only five days.” Case in point, ‘The Fame’, Gaga’s debut album moved 15 copies all over the world and has earned the singer six Grammy nods.

Shortly after Grammy Award winner Lady Gaga wrapped up her extensive Monster Ball tour in Mexico, the eclectic and eccentric diva is itching badly to go back to performing live onstage, especially with her newest studio effort, “Born this Way”, slated to hit shelves on May 23.

“I’m itching like a heroin addict trying to get back on stage. I can’t wait. I’m planning on launching a new tour by the end of this year, if not, the beginning of next,” the “Judas” and “Bad Romance” singer told the Daily Star. As for any chance of performing for a more intimate crowd, she says that her future shows will be “bigger, more epic, more of an opus… always be more me and more of an extension of what I’ve created. I always want the crowd to feel more liberated than when they first walked in.”

She stressed that her work and her personality is all about theatricality, it is what largely defines her both as a person and as a performer. So fans of the over-the-top and larger-than-life artist who are expecting her future shows to surpass any superlatives are bound to be shocked, awed and amazed – ‘impressed’ may be an understatement. “I don’t do it big for the sake of it,” she adds.

She also fueled up the excitement with the upcoming release of her newest set by premiering her third single, “Hair”, off the forthcoming album.

It’s a record breaking weekend for both Lady Gaga and microblogging site Twitter after the singer has hit the 10 million follower mark, which is also a first for the social networking site since its conception about five years ago.

Gaga thanked her fans via a tweet from London with a link to a photo of hers from the English city:

http://twitpic.com/4xtnac – 10MillionMonsters! I’m speechless, we did it! Its an illness how I love you. Leaving London smiling.

Since Gaga became a prominent fixture in the social networking scene, she has used this newfound stature to leverage her new business ventures via the power of the internet and technology in general. Aside from her partnership with Zynga, the creator of the popular Facebook game FarmVille, to launch GagaVille, and her recent Google interview with questions coming from her Twitter followers and her YouTube channel subscribers, she is also now the creative director of Polaroid and guides the company into re-launching the once famous camera to go up against a market filled with digitalized point-and-shoot and SLR cameras.

Meanwhile, flashback to two years ago, actor Ashton Kutcher broke the record for being the first Twitter user to have 1 million followers. This year, the former “That ‘70s Show” star has officially signed on to replace Charlie Sheen in the upcoming season of the CBS comedy “Two and a Half Men”, after the volatile veteran actor had a very public meltdown with the show’s creator Chuck Lorre, which caused him to be booted out of the hit show. Sheen has also used the microblogging site to vent furiously about his termination; to date, the star now also has more than a million followers.

Just last month, Justin Bieber inched closer to Lady Gaga’s Twitter stats with more than 9.6 million followers, at that rate, it won’t take long before the 17-year old pop crooner also achieves the same feat.