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But portable players, he said, "become totally useful'' when it is possible to rent an unlimited number of tracks for a flat fee. Mr. Ryan and other executives said consumers would also enjoy a greater range of tracks next year, as the download sites expand beyond pop music, and as artists migrate toward a growing revenue opportunity. Classical and jazz tracks will begin to proliferate, and Mr. Ryan said, live, archived performances from popular musicians will see new life online.
Sony would not say whether it planned to release sets of Mr. Dylan's live shows or of Yo-Yo Ma's less mainstream recordings. But Philip Wiser, Sony Music Entertainment's chief technology officer, said, "We will see more tracks go straight to digital."
Mr. Wiser said the expanding range of music would coincide with the growing number of devices consumers will use for playing digital downloads. "It'll move outside the study and into the living room," he said.
Sony's RoomLink, for example, is a $200 device that wirelessly connects a Sony Vaio comer to a television, so users can play downloaded tracks over their home theater systems, among other things.
Other computer makers and consumer electronics companies sell competing devices or are working on them. Sometimes the devices are marketed alongside specific online music stores. Napster, for instance, rolled out the Samsung Napster MP3 player this fall. It directly connects to the Napster download service and includes an FM transmitter for listening to burned tracks.
As manufacturers push the prices of portable devices ever lower - the Dell Digital Jukebox is among the cheapest, at $250 - digital music services will attract more mainstream users. "A key underlying driver of our business will be the expansion of the consumer's ability to make music portable," Napster's president, Michael Bebel, said.
Music owners will also have more flexibility in what to do with the tracks they download, said John Rose, executive vice president of EMI.
"Two or three years out, I'll be able to send you an album that you can listen to once or twice, but that will expire after a certain amount of time if you don't buy it," Mr. Rose said. "The technologies are all starting to percolate. We'll start to see much more of that come to market in the next year."
