According to the New York Times, Warner Music's Atlantic division in the US is now selling more digital product than CDs. Although overall digital sales account for about 27% of Warner Music's revenues, within Atlantic US 51% of revenues reportedly come from downloads and ringtones and the like.
Assuming that is true, that means Atlantic is shifting a lot more digital product (or a lot less physical product, depending how you look at it) than many of its competitors, or other divisions within the Warner group, where it is more common for a quarter to a third of revenue to now come from digital.
The NY Times quote a Forrester Research expert, David Card, who says he's surprised by those Atlantic stats. He told the paper - "That's a lot - that's very high. No one is near that".
From Atlantic they quote the division's chairman Julie Greenwald, who says: "I think we've figured it out. It used to be that you could connect five dots and sell a million records. Now there are 20 dots you can connect to sell a million records".
While digital sales equalling or surpassing physical sales at any label is certainly a landmark, that achievement is very different to the one many record label chiefs desire, whereby digital sales are bringing in the kind of revenue that compensates for the slump in CD sale revenues that has occurred in the last decade. That day, of course, is unlikely to come without some clever diversification on the part of the record companies, within the recorded product space or, for those who still advocate the 360 degree model, by getting involved in other aspects of the music business outside the record industry.