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.
"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 August 4 in Japan, the world's second-biggest music market after the United States.
It made an impressive start, hitting 1 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 United States - 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 that downloads rose to 500,000 songs in August 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 2005 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 that it "looks impossible" for Sony to overthrow Apple given the American company's overwhelming dominance in the sector. Sony's business priority would be elsewhere such as games and flat-screen televisions, he said.
Rio Japan, ranked third with an 11.1 percent share in July, last week announced that it would withdraw from portable digital players as it had been losing money.
But Kubota said that Sony still needed to make an effort in music players to protect the fame of its brand.
"As consumers still recognize Sony as 'the company of Walkman', the Sony brand would fall to the ground if it loses battle in this sector," he said.
Some analysts also doubt whether Japan's music download market will make explosive growth as in the United States.
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 August 1 since its launch last November.
But one song can cost about 2,700 yen ($24) unless the user is subscribed to fixed-rate or other discount services.
The latest Walkman Bean, to be launched on October 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 expects a retail price of about 20,000 yen for a one-gigabyte model, about 30 percent costlier than an iPod Shuffle.
Sony's hopes on the bean design have an air of déjà vu.
Less than a decade ago the group launched a cassette Walkman line resembling a bean and meant to woo youngsters. But the older, half-transparent Beans - four times as big and heavy as the new ones - came just as music media shifted from cassette tapes to CDs.
© 2005 Agence France-Presse
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