Says who?

Last year, iTunes passed Wal-Mart to become the biggest music store, period. See here, here, and here.

If you look at the numbers Amazon isn’t anywhere close to the volume of sales iTunes is doing.

The reason Apple has used the FairPlay DRM in iTunes was not to kill the competition, but because of it’s licenses with the record labels. The music industry was worried that if people could copy songs from one computer to another, nobody would pay for music (Napster and Kazaa come to mind).
Apple has been trying to fight this for years. See a letter from Steve Jobs himself to the music industry from Feb 2007.

The music industry has been trying to negotiate more profitable terms for selling in iTunes ever since iTunes started gaining momentum. Part of that included a tiered pricing model.

The recent iTunes announcement isn’t about Amazon and it isn’t about iTunes showing signs of weakness. It’s just about Apple allowing tiered pricing in exchange for finally being allowed by the music industry to sell DRM free tracks. See here and here.

This way, not only will you be able to copy tracks purchased in the iTunes store to any device capable of playing AAC tracks (as you mentioned), but you could also copy tracks from one computer to another without needing your Apple login.

Well done. Have read some of your other articles, and you do write well. Comment for you on this one; Apple in general and iTunes specifically are not dead. In fact, iTunes is much more than music and their audiance is much larger than youth. As a writer, professional speaker, and author, I understand the iTunes position (and that of many artists) that you sharing in the name of not paying for intellectual property is still stealing. However, Apple IS making changes because they feel their loss in one area will be offset in others. Business 101.

Keep writing, keep thinking, work hard, and have fun.