Promote your favorite musicians with iTunes?

Slipping quietly in the wake of Steve Jobs' Macworld keynote address yesterday was an update to their iTunes jukebox/music store program.

I haven't installed it yet, but one of the new features in iTunes is the "mini-store", where a small pane at the bottom of the iTunes window shows recommendations from the iTunes Music Store based on whatever song you're currently browsing (you can turn off that pane if you find it annoying).

Understandably, some folks have wondered if this means Apple was now spying on its customers. Fortunately, a little analysis of network traffic shows that iTunes is only sending the artist and title of your current selection to Apple, and that disabling the mini-store keeps iTunes mum. Seems fair to me -- if you want the iTMS to recommend stuff, it's got to know what you're listening too, right?

Privacy concerns aside (are you really going to worry if Apple finds out you like listening to "Weird Al" Yankovic 24/7? ), now I'm wondering if it's possible to turn this feature into a tool to empower the audience. After all, what happens if you're viewing/listening to a song whose artist is not carried on the iTunes Music Store? Your iTunes jukebox doesn't know this, so it's going to send the information anyway -- where, I'm guessing, it gets logged as a "request not found" on a computer somewhere.

Now, what happens if Apple ends up getting several million of these "request not found" queries? Human nature being what it is, I figure any marketing person worth his BMW will say, "Golly gee willikers, what's with all these people listening to Billy and the Boingers? They must be really popular! Quick, let's sign them up!"

So if you've got a favorite artist or genre that's currently not getting enough (or any) representation on iTunes, this could be a way for you to do some free and effortless promotion for them. Just fire up the newest iTunes, open that mini-store window, then keep clicking on the titles that you want to "vote" for. And according to the network traffic analysis, your query gets submitted if you just view on a title, so you don't even need to play the songs to submit a vote -- just keep clicking.

For those of us who aren't interested in what the mainstream music market has to offer, here's our chance to vote with our fingers. Click away!