[matsiyatzy]

While it's true that Sony has messed up their opportunities with DRM and the like, I highly doubt that Sony realistically could do what Apple did, simply because competing record labels would never in their right mind license their music in this way to another competitor. iTunes on the other hand, was just another distribution channel to the record labels, and not a direct competitor.

[spdy]

Does it really matter ?. They had around 25-28% market share in 2004 [1]. If they had created an ecosystem like Apple based around the Sony Walkman brand they could have dominated this sector as well. There was a chance for them to create an end-to-end system as Apple did it.

This could have easily blown away the ITunes Store we know today and if i remember correctly Sony`s CEO was the only one opposed to the proposal of Steve Jobs. Did he had something like this in the pipeline he would never had agreed to it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Statistics