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 cross hairs. 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 lawywers 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.