Many years ago, when I worked for a CD-ROM publishing company, the owner said, "Content is king".

Unfortunately without content, Apple is being played by those with. It seems like an "anybody but Apple" strategy to bring Apple down. How soon they forget where they were before iTunes and legal downloading.

Content matters, but not to a company like Apple. The iTMS only exists to provide content for the iPod/iPhone. If Apple didn't sell the iPod, they wouldn't have the store, not the other way around.

Amazon's service integrates very well with iTunes, allowing consumers to very easily purchase content from Amazon, but still buy their hardware from Apple.

In the end, I think it was the labels who were out played by Apple. They did what SJ wanted while thinking they were in control and really sticking it to Apple. Now the content market will start to free up, and people will have no good reason not to buy an iPod or iPhone to play their DRM free music.

Edit: Don't forget that it was Apple who also pushed to break albums up into individual songs. Apple "won" in that situation by having the first digital store to provide single tracks. However, the music was still laced with DRM. Because that was the first step the labels took into digital media sales, the tracks had to have DRM, and only the company who owned that DRM could really benefit. Now, as the labels take their next digital media step, DRM is being eliminated. This time, it doesn't matter who sells the content, as the DRM is gone, and it can be played on anything. Apple wins again.

When will my current purchases be unlocked?

So this is bad for Apple how?

I thought they made their money selling iPods, not music (only a few cents per song?).
I thought the iTunes Music Store was there because no one else supported Mac OS X way back when.

So Apple now can focus investing in better hardware instead of making a better music store.
Sounds like everyone but Apple will have to heavily invest in cut-throat razor-thin margins on unprotected music.
Sounds an awful lot like the discount PC business - something Apple stays clear of.

I think Apple has gracefully exited this market and has acquiesced to others to sell content in that manner.

I think it remains to be seen how much impact this has on sales of music at the iTunes store. How many buyers there don't care about the DRM as long as they can click on a link within iTunes and have music on their PC or Mac, iPod, and maybe CDs they burn for their car radio if it isn't iPod compatible? I don't know the answer to that, but it may be a larger number than expected.

I think what Apple should do here is integrate iTunes with the Amazon store in a non-intrusive way. This would allow you to still add the songs dynamically through iTunes while still shopping on Amazon...Perhaps allow one to surf to other music sites from within iTunes...