For once, Apple is late to the party.

For the past decade, Apple has made its name - and built its empire - on the expectation that it's permanently located on the cutting edge. Always. Way back in 2001, a whopping ten years ago, Apple introduced a little device called an iPod.  Sayonara, CDs.  In 2007 they debuted the iPhone and forever changed the smart phone market (hard to believe it's only been four years, eh?)  In 2008 the iPad came along and Apple created a market for something we didn't even know we needed yet. Now that's ingenuity.

But, sad to say, Apple missed the boat on the next big evolution: streaming music. You may have heard that iTunes Match is set to debut this fall.  What this will allow you to do is listen to all the music in your iTunes library pretty much anywhere, via the "Cloud."  Up until now, when it came to listening to music on your iPod or iPhone, you've been limited by the size of your hard drive's device.  With iTunes Match, you'll "match" songs in your database with songs in theirs to create a virtual catalog that you can access on up to five devices.  What about those independent artists or your next door neighbor's kid's band who burned a CD in their garage last spring?  You'll be able to upload the tracks to your portion of the cloud and listen to it anywhere - all for a mere $25 a year.

Here's a video about how iTunes Match will work when it comes out sometime later this fall:

No doubt, it's a great idea - for 2010. Seriously, had this come out a year ago, it would've been absolutely huge. Folks like me would've been heaping praise on Apple and raving about how, once again, they'd beaten everyone else to the punch. Instead, even Apple loyalists like me are greeting this news with a half-hearted "meh."

That's because the cloud-based music streaming boat has already pulled out of port.  Rhapsody and Grooveshark were two of the first to do it, and Google Music snuck in there for a spell.  But it got kicked into major overdrive this past summer when Spotify made it across the Atlantic and came stateside.  And it did more than just make streaming music (all music, not just what you have on your hard drive) easy and practical for the average music-lover.  It also integrated a social media component where you can see what your Facebook friends are listening to.  I can't tell you the number of bands I've discovered simply by looking at the public Spotify playlists my friends have created.  For that reason, Spotify is now the life of the party, at least when it comes to how we listen to and discover music.

While Apple's latest move may be late, the clear loser in all of this is obvious: the record labels. In fact, some have suggested that iTunes Match will encourage more music pirating.  They're probably right.  But in this day and age, with technology changing so incredibly fast, the labels have their hands tied.  And unless they want to be left totally out of the game and watch more and more artists go independent, they recognize that giving up more than they want is still better than losing it all.

I'll probably still pay the 25 bucks and get iTunes Match up and running - my loyalty to Apple dies hard, and it'd be a pain creating a gazillion Spotify playists to match my iTunes catalog.  But Apple needs to take notice - and not just because their great prophet and oracle, Steve Jobs, recently exited stage left.  Apple has made its name by being ahead of the curve and creating a product or service that didn't exist before - and then (and this is important) making us feel like we simply couldn't live without it.  When it comes to streaming music, though, they've arrived late to the party and found Spotify and others already digging into the hors d'oeuvres.

So what do you think - is Spotify going to trump even hard-core Apple enthusiasts like myself, or will iTunes Match have a solidified place in the world of streaming music?

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