New Music Service Clouds iTunes' Dominance

It's always good news when a scrappy, bright-eyed contender has the audacity to take on the big guys. In this case, a new cloud-based service from blueTunes hopes to make portability of music libraries simple and fast — perhaps even putting Apple's wildly popular iTunes in its crosshairs. This doesn't warrant an apples to apples (pardon the pun) comparison, but there are some overlaps.

The service, described in a TechCrunch article, launches tonight. It's a desktop application that scans your hard drive for music files and then lets you upload them onto blueTunes' servers and stream to any device, including a smartphone or laptop. While that's not entirely new, its method truly is novel. Uploading music can take a long time, but blueTunes has created a brilliantly simple shortcut:

"While you still have to prove that you own your music (the site uses a Java app to check through your music folders), the site only makes you upload songs that aren’t already in its database. In other words, unless you’ve got a really eclectic collection, you’ll be able to transfer your library to the cloud without having to move many files."

That means blueTunes also has created a service that keeps the music industry's lawyers at bay. Another benefit of the would-be iTunes killer (perhaps that's a stretch) is its use of a desktop client instead of a Web browser. As the TechCrunch article points out, it can get kind of confusing keeping track of which browser window is playing the music — so the blueTunes application eliminates that potential headache.

Who knows if blueTunes, not to mention other online music services, will gain substantial market share and — at least in my humble opinion — who cares. The point is that iTunes is getting some much-needed competition, and we all know how important that is to innovation and consumer choice.