Critics frequently attach the phrase “lock-in” to Apple’s iTunes Store – iTunes – iPod/iPhone combination. But, in the post-DRM age, what does that mean, exactly?

First, you have to recall that while for many of us the manual drag-and-drop music management is appealing, it isn’t so for many average consumers. They want sync. That means that music will be stored in iTunes and synced to Apple devices and nothing else. Apple is serious about locking you to their store and their devices, enough so that they frequently update their software with special keys that prevent the use of devices. iTunes is “free,” but Apple determines which mobile devices you can use and which you can’t. And Apple has gone after anyone who dares give you the ability to use your own music software or own devices, including efforts (ironically) to make their iPhone and iPod work with Linux and open source players.

These efforts don’t protect the music or prevent privacy – they protect users of Apple’s software and mobile devices from using anything but Apple’s tools. Yet Apple has used the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to take legal action over anyone who dares to even talk about how to use legally-purchased music and hardware:

OdioWorks v Apple

Perhaps suspecting their case was too thin to defend, Apple eventually backed off that particular claim — after, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “7 months of censorship and a lawsuit.”

Apple Withdraws Threats Against Wiki Site

But the software and hardware locks are unchanged. And Apple has won, in my view, an even more important battle: they have a monopoly over mindshare.

The urgency of being way behind a single dominant player can make electronics makers do some odd stuff to promote their products. iPod, once an icon of digital cool, has achieved such ubiquity that it doesn’t even try to be hip any more. The thing is being promoted with American Idol, for crying out loud — not exactly indie cred. We saw Microsoft enlisting indie musicians and animators to sell Zune, of course.

But here’s where things get surprisingly amazing: Sony is using weird and wonderful Japanese experimental music to promote Walkman.

Now we’re talking.

And whether or not Walkman is cool again, this is for sure: Japanese experimental musicians? Mind-blowingly cool. And, apparently, in love with using light as a controller for sound.

Atsuhiro Ito uses contact mics on a fluorescent bulb he dubs the Optron. Instead of just being stage eye candy, the bulbs are really making the sounds here; coupled with guitar effects, he can solo on the bulbs. It’s what the Knitting Factory will be like after the nuclear winter. I can’t wait.

Taeji Sawai uses a light pen to draw melodic lines and rhythmic onto a screen. The basic effect – track light from a single source – is old. Yet he’s clearly got a brilliant aesthetic mind that makes it all work; the elements are strikingly simple but never fail to be engaging. And there’s a strong connection to work by his fellow sonic inventor Toshio Iwai.

Thanks to our friend Donald Bell of cnet, aka very talented and (cool) musician Chachi Jones, who has a great write-up:

Sony Walkman promos are awesome, confusing

Confusing? No, I’d say Sony is confusing; the real question is why their Walkman can’t be more like these ads. Plus, since neither Don nor I can read Japanese, how do we know those characters don’t say something like “Hey, guys, sorry for that bit with the lousy boring electronics – we’re coming back from the dark side to make awesome things again”? Okay, maybe not. (Do let me know if the next one says “Fine, you damned snarky blogger, I’d like to see you run a giant multinational corporation.”)

Admittedly, the problem here is this makes me want to toss my iPod touch out the window and build my own open source MP3 player with Popsicle sticks and wire, or, at best, mod an original Walkman so I can play circuit-bent OGG files using power from a bicycle. At the very least, I’m ready to add to my Atsuhiro Ito and Taeji Sawai collection. And I don’t think their full body of work is on iTunes. That’s just as well.

So, Sony, thanks. Now, will you let us run homebrew music apps on your PSP? Please?

Last week, Apple rejected a podcast management app because, to paraphrase Apple’s own policy, they want iTunes handling all podcasts for you and not any third-party apps. (Officially, “Since Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.”)

Over the past few days, that’s generated plenty of chatter on the blogosphere, mostly centering around technical and philosophical discussions of the way Apple manages its developer relations and application approval.

But let’s cut right to the chase. This time, it’s not about Apple’s App Store or approval process. That’s Apple’s model, and it’s their choice to continue to defend its merits against its competitors. (That’s not to say it hasn’t introduced some limitations; see Gizmodo for a good overview of that.) This is really about iTunes. A discussion of the way Apple is using the dominance of iTunes to control how music and media is consumed is long overdue.

I can think of no better time to have just that conversation. In one week, Apple has sent a strong message. They shipped iTunes 8, which delivered mediocre knock-offs of functionality in other tools, all intended to keep you inside Apple’s ecosystem and away from what should be an increasingly-vibrant set of alternatives. They delivered another iPod touch/iPhone firmware update that still doesn’t deliver basic connectivity to your computer — and, as a result, was hacked within hours by users wanting that functionality. And they then blocked a third-party app that delivered something they hadn’t, in order to protect their own more limited solution — the opposite of what building a developer platform is supposed to be about.

What makes this all so frustrating is they still make the best mobile music and video player in the world. So why are they clamping that player into a chastity belt?

Assuming you’ve survived hours of waiting on line or weathered various technical problems, Apple’s app store is online. Anyone with iTunes can have a look; it’s right inside the iTunes Store (formerly the iTunes Music Store). But while Apple’s development platform is impressive, early in the game a lot of the actual music apps seem to me to be, frankly, underwhelming. (Some of the non-musical apps look far better, like the lovely free client for awesome note-taking service Evernote.)

Click through to App Store > Music, and you may feel like you’ve entered a time warp to simplistic handheld music apps from the Palm and Windows Mobile platforms, only dressed up with shiny new eye candy – and $5 and $10 prices. You’ve got your choice of several guitar tuners and metronomes, and various sound toys that mimic instruments. Also, I find the iTunes interface rather annoying. You get a bunch of shiny icons but it’s hard to find specific tools. So, after all these years, are we still struggling to catch up to late 90s Palm apps? Really?

For those of you who are interested, Apple’s WWDC keynote has focused today on the iPhone 3G and the iPhone SDK. Macworld has a nice live blow-by-blow.

Here’s the bottom line for me. First, Apple has done an incredible job of demonstrating the potential of rich media apps in general, mobile and otherwise. They’ve showed off a powerful set of third-party applications that go beyond what most people think of on phones, including rich 3D, positional 3D audio (via OpenAL), and music apps. And it’s nice to see those rich media apps alongside things like push messaging. We’re seeing phones as mobile creative devices and not just as phones or even game systems. Music apps in particular prove to be massive hits with mainstream audiences, not just “pro audio” audiences. See our round-up of iPhone/iPod Touch music apps for a glimpse of what this can look like. Band, a set of software instruments, made an officially-sanctioned appearance right in the keynote to widespread cheers from a non-musician audience. And the fact that it’s official means you’ll get great new apps even without hacking your iPhone in the near future, as we hoped.

And this is, of course, what musicians and live visualists have been saying since the iPhone’s release: third-party software development, far beyond what Apple alone can imagine, is what really makes mobile devices interesting. Here on CDM, we’ve seen novel applications like VJs running live visuals in clubs and Pro Tools controllers, among other things, and now a lot of that is likely to become official. And given music apps for Nintendo portable game consoles and Palm and Windows Mobile PDAs, this should be no surprise. But what is a surprise, perhaps, is that mainstream audiences are excited about these things as we are.

We also now know the iPhone 3G will be US$199 and available in more countries, which means volume is likely to increase fast.

I don’t need to hype up the iPhone, though — I expect you’ve got the whole blogosphere for that. But platforms are about tradeoffs; there’s no such thing as a perfect platform. And with all the iPhone lust, we seem to be missing some of the downsides of Apple’s approach: