Its (sic) hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future.

He’s trying to justify their lack of interoperability by saying the loss the user would experience is small. If I buy one song, I want to take it with me. I’ve ripped my old collection of CDs that I’ve collected over the past 15 odd years, so it’s not surprising that they make up the bulk of my collection compared to MP3s I’ve bought online. If all my future purchases are online, that 3% is going to grow, it’s just a matter of catch up.

I won’t use the iTunes store because of the DRM. My iPod’s battery now sucks and I have no inclination to buy another one. My phone makes a pretty good music player, as does my laptop. Closed DRM systems will only work if the manufacturer, Apple, controls every bit of hardware I want to play music on, and that’s not going to happen.