WITH only days to go before the top music companies start selling music online, they appear unwilling, at least initially, to support most of the digital music players currently sold.
Analysts have dim expectations for the new ventures because their music will remain largely chained for now to the computer desktop — and only for as long as subscribers pay to "rent" it.
"What"s the use if I"m going to have it on my desktop and I can"t take it with me?" says Jackie DeLeon, 26, a student housing coordinator at the University of Illinois-Chicago who uses her portable MP3 player in her car.
An estimated 1.4 million portable MP3 players have been sold in the United States. Music fans who own them transfer MP3s downloaded from the internet or copied from CDs into the devices and go mobile.