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On early Ipods music was effectively "glued" to the individual player with a primitive DRM/scambling system.

So, you were dead in the water without Itunes that kept the fairplay key for that particular player

Yeah so you could lose music, but you could just restore the iPod and put new music on it. It didn't become a brick at any point unless it literally broke.

Only for music downloaded from the iTunes Store. Even then, the restrictions were functionally identical to what was applied to desktop computers.

FairPlay was never applied to MP3 (or, later, AAC) files you loaded onto the device yourself -- you could pull them back off the device with little difficulty.

When my friends and I first got ipods, we figured you'd be able to just plug into peoples laptops and copy songs like a thumb drive. Boy did we learn that day.

I had (still have in a drawer) a 1st gen ipod, but used some gnu audio software (I forget what) to encode (encrypt?) and transfer music I had ripped from CD's I own. I never used itunes.

I think it wasn't until later generations they made this more difficult.

because they were tied to itunes?

Maybe how they used FireWire when it was on its way out?