After my experiments of last night with linking my “Now playing” tags to tracks at iTMS, I realize it will work too rarely to be useful to anyone. See the graphic: from that album, only one track is available and it’s not the one that’s playing. (and on the track playing now — listed below — the only tracks I could find by searching for “magazine” were audiobook selections from Penthouse magazine [now you can even skip reading the articles and have them read to you?], nothing by the artist.)
So I suppose the best way to do this would be to extend what I already do and embed the affiliate-linked URL in the Comment ID3 tag and let ecto drop that in when the iTunes button is pressed. But since a. I already have Amazon metadata for my existing library, and b. so few tracks are available, why bother?
And on a related note, why doesn’t Apple include that information in the tracks it sells through iTMS? I bought Elvis Costello’s “Delivery Man” today and the only way I can link to iTMS so you might buy it (and credit me) is to track down the affiliate program link maker, not the other one. If they even included the product ID, we could build the HTML around that. As it is now, I have a custom tag that, given an ASIN number (B0002VEPL2), will build an Amazon affiliate link.
Now playing: Stuck by Magazine from the album “The Correct Use Of Soap” | Buy it