SEVERAL online music services will be available here in the coming months, offering fans more ways to download and play songs on their computers, MP3 players and cellphones.

Leading the charge are phone makers Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, eager to seize on the booming popularity of multimedia phones which double as MP3 players.

Nokia will open an online store here in the next three months, while Sony Ericsson plans to do so by the end of the year.

Motorola, which bought home-grown music store Soundbuzz in January, will release a phone next month that lets a user browse Soundbuzz's entire music collection.

Until now, music lovers here had only Soundbuzz and SingTel's MusicVibes service, which catered to subscribers. But as CD sales plummet and as users turn to downloading music, phone makers have come up with online services.

Most users will be able to access the new stores, regardless of the brand of their phones.

Nokia is likely to charge users here the same price to download a song as it does at its British store: 80 pence (S$2.24). It will also offer a streaming service, which allows viewers to listen to its entire catalogue without buying songs. The British store charges ?8 a month for this.

Mr Yoong Leong-Yan, Nokia's head of music, TV and video for the South-east Asian and Pacific regions, said the Finnish phone maker had sold 176 million music-enabled phones last year and that 76 per cent of its users listened to music on the phone, evidence that the handset could one day replace regular MP3 players as the music gizmo of choice.

Rival Sony Ericsson is readying a similar music service, PlayNow Arena, for the fourth quarter of this year. Prices have not been firmed up.

Motorola will launch its Rokr E8 phone next month, which lets users browse Soundbuzz's catalogue and buy songs on the go.

Apple's iTunes Music Store is the gold standard for getting music online. It charges 99 US cents (S$1.37) per song and has sold four billion songs worldwide in about five years.

But it is not available here, except to a few people, including those who have credit cards with billing addresses in the US, Britain, Australia and several other countries.

Those who have used iTunes said the other stores would have to be as easy to use if they wanted to be taken seriously. Undergraduate Tony Thio, 24, said it was good to have more options, but the new services would have to match iTunes in price and variety. 'You have to have something interesting, easy to use and which lets you download a song even at 2am if you want to.'