Record label reaches a milestone that no other major competitor has hit: more than half of its music sales in the U.S. are now from digital products.
(From The New York Times)
The story "Digital sales surpass CDs at Atlantic" published November 26, 2008 at 5:25 AM is no longer available on CNET News.
Content from The New York Times expires after 7 days.
November 10, 2009 1:12 PM PST
November 10, 2009 1:05 PM PST
November 10, 2009 12:13 PM PST
Add headlines from CNET News to your homepage or feedreader.
More feeds available in our RSS feed index.
Related quotes
Nanotech - The Circuits Blog
Intel Celeron chip anchors $249 Acer Windows 7 laptopBest Buy is launching its lowest-advertised-price laptop to date--and it's definitely a laptop, not a Netbook.
Gallery
Images: Firefox through the ages
Crave
Troll Touch adds touch screen to iMacs, MacBooksThe company sells resistive touch screens that can be slipped over the existing panels and connected to the machines via a USB port to impart some multitouch love.
Beyond Binary
Windows 7 use continues to climbIt now makes up 4 percent of Web-accessing computers, a mark that took Windows Vista nearly seven months to reach.
Video
Exploratorium's shocking 40th anniversary kicks off
CNET News Daily Podcast
CNET News Daily Podcast: Kindles, Droids and gadgets for the blindDid you hear? Motorola's Droid appears to be selling well. That's not all though, Intel's come up with a reading device for the blind that uses a digital camera of all things. These stories and more in today's episode.
Video
A new workout for the Wii
The Social
A new set of rules for social gamesPlayfish's $300 million sale to Electronic Arts seems to spell good news for other makers of social-network games, but this is a fast-growing and messy niche filled with one plot twist after another.
Cutting Edge
Winner declared in space elevator raceLaserMotive wins $900,000 in NASA's Space Elevator challenge, where teams compete to see who could drive their space elevator the fastest.
Gallery
Photos: Top-rated reviews of the week
Crave
DIY podcasting with the PM Series Podcaster kitThe PM Series Podcaster kit gives you mostly everything you need to start recording and producing your own podcasts.
Green Tech
iControl adds home energy services to broadbandStart-up iControl is developing a home automation system that includes energy management along with home security or broadband services.
Firstly the record industry does not care about how much the artist gets.
Secondly digital distribution comes at a much reduced production cost, no need to produce or ship CD's. Also they have cut out the middle man, i.e. the shop and their mark up, and replaced it with a much cheaper micro-payment to the digital distribution company.
This along with the fact that still some of the most popular music (The Beatles) are not available online and a lot of music is only available on a small selection of music services.
The record industry needs to streamline it's operations for the new distribution service, drop DRM and make all it's songs freely available worldwide, then the money will start coming in. Oh and making a point of giving more money to the artist and making it known will help too, people are much more likely to buy music if they think the artist is getting a fair share and all the money is not just going to prop up the music industry.
So that eliminates some wasted money right there. And just looking at what's being bought, or traded online, are people really trading entire albums at a time, or just the songs they like? For most albums there are some crap songs that no one really know why they are there. Now, the public doesn't have to pay for crap they don't want.
So after removing the duplicate songs, and the extra crap that no one wants, there will be a smaller overall number of songs being bought.