Apple should get significant credit here. It was Steve Jobs' open letter of 2007-02-06 to the big four labels calling for them to go DRM free that got the ball rolling. EMI agreed, and Apple started selling DRM-free tracks from them on 2007-05-27.
Amazon's public beta of their MP3 store launched on 2007-09-25, four months after Apple had started selling DRM-free music. Amazon was the first to get contracts in place with all four major labels for DRM-free music.