Mac 911 Weblog: It's the Standard, Stupid

Mac 911 Weblog: It's the Standard, Stupid:

"The same people who buy inexpensive players are also purchasing music online from sources other than the iTunes Music Store and thereby amassing collections of music that are incompatible with the iPod. What are the odds that these people will become iPod owners if their music collections won’t play on it?"
Feel free to enter your single digit answer here."

I think that the economic model the assertion is made on is flawed in that the larger part of most people's digital music collections is composed of DRM-free MP3 files encoded from their libraries of compact disks. In the future this may or may not change. The early adopters or the second wave of adopters have certainly taken to music downloads, but there still exist many technical hurdles before non-computer savvy people are able to download music and feel comfortable doing it. The other half of the Apple's loss leader in the iTunes Music Store is the iTunes music management software, which like the music download service is the industry leader both in sales and design. More than any other system, it stands a chance of enabling non-technical people to enjoy how their personal computer can enhance their audio experience.