As the music download market grows more competitive on its home turf of Japan, Sony, the inventor of the Walkman, is arming itself with style -- handheld music machines that look like jelly beans.
The struggling electronics icon is to launch a new digital Walkman dubbed the "Walkman Bean" in late October as it takes aim at Apple Computer's phenomenally popular iPod.
The pop design targets "young people and women," according to Sony Marketing communications manager Saori Takahashi.
PHOTO: AFP
"The core users [of digital portable music players] have been men in their late 20s or older who like cutting-edge gadgets, but demand is now spreading to younger age groups and women," she said.
Apple opened its online download service iTunes Music Store on Aug. 4 in Japan, the world's second-biggest music market after the US.
It made an impressive start, hitting one million downloads within four days, the fastest pace in the 20 countries where the service is available.
Music downloading has just started spreading in high-tech Japan, where rental CD shops -- unheard of in the US -- let consumers copy music for non-commercial, personal use.
The arrival of iTunes appears to have stimulated the market further. Another download service, Mora, affiliated with Sony, said downloads rose to 500,000 songs last month from the previous monthly sales of 450,000.
As the iPod swept the world, Sony last year used the 25th birthday of the Walkman, which in its time had revolutionized music, to announce the launch of hard drive-based portable music players.
The Network Walkman NW-HD1, following a line of 1,100 Walkman models, made its debut in July last year in Japan, followed by the April launch of the flash memory-based Walkman Stick to counter iPod Shuffle.
The Stick, designed like a slim perfume bottle and boasting 50 hours of playback on a single charge, has helped raise Sony's share of the market.
Apple held a combined 35 percent share in Japan's market of hard drive and chip-based portable music players in July, down from 45.1 percent a year earlier, according to BCN, a Tokyo-based firm conducting IT industry research.
Sony was second-ranked, with a share of 19.5 percent, up from 7.7 percent a year earlier.
As an entertainment conglomerate with software content, Sony lagged behind Apple in opening up digital music players' market due to concerns about copying on digital format. It was also late in adopting popular MP3 formats.
For a latecomer, Sony "got off to a good start," said Kazumasa Kubota, electronics analyst at Okasan Securities. But he warned against concluding that the Walkman's founder was making a strong comeback.
"Japan's digital music player market is much smaller than the US one," he said.
"Profitability will also be a problem even if its share expands" amid a price war, he said.
Sony has drastically cut its profit forecast for the current financial year as depressed electronics prices hit its earnings.
Kubota said it "looks impossible" for Sony to overthrow Apple given the US company's overwhelming dominance in the sector. Sony's business priority would be elsewhere such as games and flat-screen televisions, he said.
Some analysts doubt whether Japan's music download market will make explosive growth as in the US.
Kazuharu Miura, analyst at Daiwa Institute of Research, pointed to the rental CD shops.
"You need to have personal computers for online music downloads. Besides, junior-high and high school students, who spend a lot on music, have no credit cards, making rental shops more convenient for them," he said.
Downloading and listening to music with mobile phones has also proved popular in Japan. Telecom carrier KDDI's downloading service hit 14.2 million songs by Aug. 1 since its launch last November.
But one song can cost about ?2,700 (US$24) unless the user is subscribed to fixed-rate or other discount services.
The latest Walkman Bean, to be launched on Oct. 26 here and around the date elsewhere in the world, pops up a UBS jack to be connected into a computer without a cord.
Sony expect a retail price of about ?20,000 for a one-gigabyte model, about 30 percent costlier than an iPod Shuffle.
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