I said Apple shoud have added this feature way back on November 11th. Nice to see they finally got around to it.

And no record store in the mall lets you waltz in with albums you already own and request a bin full of all other music by that band only. Thatรขโ‚ฌโ„ขs right, now you can just click a Quick Link in your personal library to get an instant display of tracks more like it in the iTunes Music Store.

Adding that link was a no brainier. Now if they'll only think different and normalize.

Update: Boy, they botched that addition. The arrow icons on every song (that are "links") are annoying. Luckily they're just one pref click away from being zapped. An extra button for looking at songs related to the one you're listening to, positioned at the top of iTunes, would be much nicer -- useful without being intrusive.

I also tried clicking beside a Hookah Brown song I snagged from Furthurnet. Sure enough, Apple hadn't gotten that far into their link logic, and Rich Robinson's latest band to go belly-up didn't even return a recommendation for The Black Crowes. If it's in CDDB, you'd think Apple could have the goods in iTunes.

A better idea would be for Apple to grab something open like FreeDB (I think that's open) and get a database that has good links with relationships running on one of their servers. In this case it's not so much the information that's as important as the implementation of what's being done with the info, so even a GPL solution should work just fine. If they have to keep CDDB around as a front-line, but appeal to the Free replacement in case CDDB strikes out, I think it'd still be worth it.

Voila, spam for the day.