TUNING UP LIKE NOBODY'S BUSINESS Making a buck selling music online will be tough, but a raft of sites are at the ready

For years, record companies squelched efforts to sell tunes online, for fear of Napster-style piracy. Now, suddenly, the floodgates are opening. Giants ranging from Dell and Sony to Amazon.com and Wal-Mart are scrambling to set up Web music stores. So are a number of smaller players. With at least a dozen players likely to enter the market over the next few months, competition will be fierce. Two classes of winners will likely emerge: those with sufficient scale to convert meager per-song margins into meaningful profits and those that use music to sell add-ons, be it hardware, subscriptions to online music magazines, or concert tickets. So why this rush to jump in? For hardware giants such as Dell, Sony, or Apple, the real money will be made selling music players. Smaller players are counting on selling premium content.