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One didn't have to be asleep to miss Sony's announcement of a new digital Walkman in Japan. As a matter of fact, most people who were awake were busy lining up to buy Apple's new Nano, which comes hot on the heels of the company's heralded entrance into Japan's digital music market, and looks poised to be yet another home run for Apple.
For those who still haven't heard, Sony will offer two hard disk music players - one with a storage capacity of 20 gigabytes, the company's flagship, and the other with 6 gigabytes - along three flash- memory-based players. The flash memory players preserve the appearance of Sony's present flash lineup, while the hard disk players feature a sleek, futuristic oval shape with a clean, logical interface.
The Walkman has several notable new features. 'My Favorite Shuffle' automatically selects the most listened to 100 songs and plays them at random. The 'Time Machine Shuffle' function randomly selects a year and plays all of the songs from that particular year found on the device. The 'Artist Link' function will search every artist, album and song on the player and offers suggestions of artists and bands by genre, which is coded into the files.
The 20GB version is available in two colors, violet and silver; while the 6GB unit also comes colors of pink and blue. All models are packaged with matching headphones.
Sony could use a win with this release. Since the iPod was launched in 2001, Sony's revenue from audio players has been in a steady decline - not good news for the company that singlehandedly popularized portable music players.
Considering the late start, however, generating buzz for the new Walkman won't be an easy task. Sony didn't come out with its first Walkman digital music players until July, 2004 - almost three years after Apple's iPod. And while last year's Walkman models did do well in Japan and Europe, they haven't made much of a dent in iPod's market share.
While Apple’s share of the Japanese market has slipped from its peak of 48.5 percent in March, it was still number one with 39.4 percent last month, according to a survey by BCN Research. Sony, meanwhile has raised its share from 6 per cent at the beginning of the year to 16.5 per cent.
While a large part of the gap comes from a weak showing in the hard disk player market, Sony fares better in the flash memory market, where they had 27 percent in June compared to 20 percent for Apple's iPod shuffle. However, Apple's iTunes debut in August may be influencing share in this area as well.
Overall in 2004, Sony shipped about 850,000 Walkmans worldwide, according to Deutsche Securities in Japan. This year, the company is shooting for global sales of around 4.5 million units, including the latest models, which will be available in Japan on Nov. 19, and in other markets later this year.
The numbers look pretty good in a vacuum, but remember that this is a market boasting double-digit annual growth and very very big numbers. Research firms predict that the market for digital-music players will balloon to 57 million units this year from almost 37 million units last year, which gives Sony just a sliver of the pie. By some estimates, the market could grow to 132 million units before 2010.
For the present (and the foreseeable future), Apple remains the portable music leader, having sold more than 22 million iPods worldwide since 2001. However, it's not all bad for Sony. Sony Ericsson, the joint venture between the Japanese electronics company and Swedish mobile phone maker Ericsson, launched a Walkman-branded music phone known as the W800 on August 12 - nearly four weeks before Apple's new ROKR, the iTunes-enabled phone developed by Apple and Motorola that is receiving mixed reviews. And if history has any lessons to teach us, it is way too early to count Sony out in ANY market - especially on their home turf.
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