Amazon is teaming up with EMI and surely others to offer music that isn’t subject to all those annoying restrictions on using the tunes you download from the Internet.

This is an important development for two reasons.

First, it’s a sign that music publishers are coming to their senses and realizing that fighting the spread of music is pretty futile. It is just about the easiest thing to copy and pirate since it is all digital now and, unlike movies, can be zipped around in a flash thanks to today’s ever pervasive broadband connections (see Stephen Wildstrom’s of BusinessWeek’s Tech Beat blog for more on this).

Don’t get me wrong; I’m on the side of the good guys here in that stealing intellectual property is wrong, but it’s also time for music publishers to start looking for new business models rather than new ways to plug the holes in the dyke holding back the digital music tidal wave.

Second, it is yet another sign that Apple is so dominant in this space that the music publishers will do almost anything to regain control over their own destinies again.

It’s amazing that Apple, through a clever product and smart business model, has been able to put itself at the center of the digital music ecosystem.

So how is Amazon going to do? Well, I’m dubious.

Amazon is offering music that isn’t subject to digital rights management and promoting the MP3 format. That’s both noble and seemingly sensible since MP3 players are still the dominant challenger of Apple. But more than 100 million buyers have plunked down serious money for iPods and that tells me that people really like Apple’s hardware.

Music players have become very personal and the Apple magic has attracted an awful lot of people who could have kept both their MP3 players and ripped off music to their hearts’ content. If Apple is going to face a serious challenge it is going to be from someone who gets the hardware/software combination right–with an appealing, easier to use design.

Microsoft has tried this with Zune (which might still succeed). Others will try as well. But it won’t be easy to knock Apple off its throne in the digital music empire.