When Eliot Spitzer hands you lemons, just make lemonade.

That may well be the mantra the suits at Warner Music Group (NYSE:WMG) are chanting these days. Just over a week ago, after all, they were singing the blues, 'fessing up to payola allegations that Spitzer's New York Attorney General's office had brought against them -- and facing the music to the tune of more than $5 million.

But the second verse ain't the same as the first. Indeed, when Warner -- which went public just this past May -- released its fourth-quarter results yesterday, investors promptly sent its shares flying up the charts by more than 5.5%.

So what's behind the Warner-mania?

Well, while these are early days for Warner as a publicly traded company, the firm seems to have found its revenue groove. Quarterly sales grew by some 13% to $905 million on a year-over-year basis, with digital revenue ticking up by 20% sequentially. And though you have to sort through -- and exclude -- numerous one-off charges to arrive at the figure, Q4 operating income at the company weighed in at $61 million.

With that as a backdrop, Warner positively shellacked the analysts; on average, they had expected a loss of roughly $0.04/share. Instead, except for FAS 123 -- which requires the expensing of stock options -- and special-items charges -- which include $4 million related to the Spitzer settlement -- Warner would have passed out earnings per share of $0.08 per stub.

All of which begs the burning question: Is now the time for investors to dive into a company that counts the likes of Madonna, R.E.M., Green Day, and Tom Petty as its "products"?

I don't think so.

Yes, Warner is clearly making corporate progress and, also yes, the company did a fine job of narrowing its non-adjusted loss from a bone-crunching $1.27 per share during the year-ago period to "just" $0.21 during this go-round. On the downside, while the revenue the firm derived from digital music sales is certainly encouraging, it still accounted for just 6% of the company's Q4 pie -- a drop in the bucket, when what's needed in this crucial, future-is-now area is clearly a big splash.

Last point: Since it's a newly public company, reading Warner's financial results these days is more art than science -- a dynamic that prospective investors (not to mention adjustment-happy financial analysts) should bear in mind before putting the company's stock into their portfolio playlists.

Here's the upshot for Foolish investors with a hankering for more media exposure: Eye more established players whose revenue streams aren't so heavily leveraged to a business model that may soon go the way of the 8-track. The more diversified likes of Motley Fool Stock Advisor pick Time Warner (NYSE:TWX), Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO), Disney (NYSE:DIS), and News Corp. (NYSE:NWS) all look more attractive to me than Warner, which has a ways to go before proving that its impressive roster of artists adds up to a viable investment in the iPod age.

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Shannon Zimmerman is the lead analyst for the Motley Fool Champion Funds newsletter service and owns shares of Disney. The Fool has a strict disclosure policy.