The "Lock in realization"

Disclosure: I am a product manager for RealNetworks... but the below story simply represents facts.

A good friend of mine is working on Wall Street and he shot me an email yesterday with a question I have gotten from numerous people. Here was the question:

"What if I have 4GB worth of songs on a laptop and want to get them to a new laptop... how can I easily do that?"

Easy question to answer, but while answering the question I learned that the 4GB of songs were purchased from iTunes and that this person was scared to move them from PC to PC because he heard about the limitations put on the number of PCs a song can be on.

Now for the "lock in realization"... I told my friend not to worry much about the PC issue, but that songs purchased from iTunes can't be put on other MP3 players and his response was "I didn't realize that". Ok... here is someone who has made a $1,000 investment in music and now is locked-in to the iPod.

If he wants to play these songs on a different device he is screwed. He will have to go through the hassle of burning hundreds of CDs and then ripping them. I of course went on to tell him that songs purchased from Real are portable to the most number of devices, including the iPod....

The reason I am raising this issue is that this is something thousands of consumers across the country are dealing with, and they won't be happy to learn they bought songs that lock them in to a platform.