Your Music In The Cloud No More – blueTunes Keels Over, Dies

It took a bit longer than we thought, but the inevitable has happened: blueTunes is calling it quits.

A message posted on the website reads:

We have decided to pursue other opportunities and will be shutting down our service on January 31, 2011.
Thanks for supporting us and for all you’ve done.

In an email to users, blueTunes founders Nick Alexander and Andrew First acknowledge that, after two years, the service will cease to operate at the end of the month. All user data will be deleted, but anyone who wants to download their data before that happens is invited to get in touch with them.

BlueTunes let you scan your hard drive for music files and upload them to the site’s servers, after which you could stream your music from wherever you are.

The startup’s technology, which it said was patent-pending, was able to match uploaded music files against a user network-wide database for existing copies of an album or track in order to speed up the file uploading process.

BlueTunes was originally launched in September 2008, earning a critical review from Mike Arrington, in which he predicted the demise of the service because the music industry tends to sue companies who try their hand at something like this into oblivion.

As far as I know, this is not what happened here, but First and Alexander do say that they are “unable to continue supporting blueTunes in its current form”.

I’ve requested more details on the shutdown, and how popular the service had become in the past two years, but I’m still waiting to hear back.

Either way, the story of blueTunes ends here, although the uploading technology could potentially prove to be an asset some companies would be interested in acquiring.