The Post has got an article up today covering the current state of the online music services. It's fairly content-free, but mostly inoffensive: some college kids say they'll buy all their music when they graduate, and some industry execs think they're finally finding their way in the digital age. Of course, virtually every engineer I knew in college thought they'd be making six figures immediately after graduation, and the music industry's online strategy involves suing twelve year-olds. There's no reason to pop either of these bubbles: they're self-popping. Just wait.

But the article does spew a bit of misinformation toward the end that's worth correcting.

The company that did the most to get legal downloading off the ground may also be the lead weight on a market whose consumers like to shift among different players and services, taking their libraries with them. In addition to shutting out Napster, Apple also prompts iPod owners to use iTunes as their PC media player and online music store, making it difficult or even impossible to buy tracks from other retailers and move them directly to their devices. About 90 percent of the hard-drive-based music players sold in the United States are iPods, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

"Apple has opted to keep iPod proprietary and not let people who own them choose how they want to get digital music," Harris said.

Representatives for Apple reached by telephone and e-mail repeatedly declined to be interviewed for this story. While its adherence to a proprietary model may eventually become an obstacle to widespread adoption, Apple's strategy is sound business and unlikely to change any time soon, said Gartner G2 analyst Mike McGuire.

"In a perfect world it would all be interoperable, and everybody would make money, but in a market-driven world, is there a business case to be made for making the iPod interoperable? I don't know," McGuire said. Apple chief Steve Jobs "is doing what any business would do," he added.

Ah, "journalistic balance". In this case, though, the fair and balanced other side is, "That's the market for you! Apple's doing what it's got to do!"

But painting Apple as the outlier is inaccurate. Microsoft has assembled a consortium of content providers and portable player manufacturers around its WMA format, and the Post is acting like this is a well-respected standard. It's not. Apple has the larger marketshare, and its preferred AAC format -- unlike WMA -- is an ISO standard that can be used by programmers without paying licensing fees to Microsoft. It's also considered to be technically superior. With a quarter billion songs sold and commanding marketshare in the portable player market, it's Microsoft and its PlaysForSure consortium that's bucking the standard.

Shame on the Post for falling for MS's ridiculous marketing. Sure, Bill has assembled a broad coalition of allies, but they're the ones attempting to assert a proprietary stranglehold on the market. They're facing an uphill battle that can't be won on the merits -- so it'll be PR efforts like this article that lead the way. They're counting on stooge articles like this one.

Oh, and that bit about iPod users having no choices besides iTunes? Not true. Not at all.