I've looked all over the web and can't find any current (or any at all, really) info on how to create affiliate links dynamically. You can link to any artist or album, but you have to do a search through LinkShare manually and get the code. I keep thinking this *can't* be as hard as it is seeming. Wouldn't everyone want to do this?? It doesn't seem to have come up too often on the web, which I can't believe. Wouldn't keeping this a secret just mean Apple was shooting itself in the foot? What possible gain could they have by not making this a simple feature? I did find a website explaining using the phobos thing, but another saying the system had changed and that no longer works. Any insight?
I actually haven't poked into this, but there's an iTunes plugin written by a guy named Brandon Fuller that populates info about what you're playing to an XML file that you can then parse. It grabs all the applicable phobos data and basically creates the Linkshare (or Amazon) link. I'm not sure if he grabs the variables through the iTunes interface or through some kind of iTunes Store API, though, so I can't be of much help, but if you want to see what he's done, you can check it out here: http://brandon.fuller.name/archives/hacks/nowplaying/ I use his little app to pop what I'm listening to on my stupid blog and to wrap the image in a link to Linkshare and it works like a charm. I hate giving half answers like this, but I just don't have a better answer. EDIT: I did poke around concerning an API after I typed the above, but it looks like the best answer is that there was a bit of a hole for a while in one of the search functions on the store, people exploited it and then it was closed and then there was another way to access the cover art remotely too, people exploited it and then it was closed as well, so it looks like the short version is that it's not available right now. Interestingly, the Now Playing app does dump all this info to an XML file and create the LinkShare/phobos link automatically, after which you can manipulate that data however you want through PHP (or whatever other language you like). It also produces the same file even if you just click on and play a preview of a sing in iTunes, so if you could somehow queue all the songs you want in your list up or, as stupid as it sounds, click on all of the previews you want long enough for it to write the XML file and then suck the album info and the LinkShare URL into the DB. I feel ridiculous even typing out such a Rube Goldberg style solution, but it popped into my head so there you go, heh.
Thanks for the reply. It strikes me as very wierd that this would be seen by Apple as something to "exploit". I have a database with thousands of albums in it; when someone does a search, I would like users to be able to download the album from iTunes if possible. With so many albums, I'm obviously not going to do it manually. Why wouldn't Apple allow this?!? Don't they want people to download songs!? As it is now, they are cutting themselves out of the loop and missing out on money. It's kind of like Google's AdWords nonsense ... does having a product everyone wants really make people crazy?
Who knows? Maybe they like to keep their users captured inside the iTunes application for some reason. I can't give you a good answer. They do offer a web object for searching songs -the one you use on LinkShare, it's accessible independently - but I can't figure out how to automate the search except to supply the string and parse the following page. The problem is that I don't want to do that, heh. I looked into this further and it turns out that some guys captured the data from the ITMS (iTunes Music Store) stream and figured out how to make their own calls to it, but that seems to have stopped working sometime after 2005 and I can't find anyone since then that's made it work. My best guess would be to contact someone like the guy that made Now Playing and contract him to develop an an iTunes "plug in" that you could feed CSVs or XML files or something into and get LinkShare links out of.
Apple are notorious for keeping their systems closed but I can't see how not offering dynamic link creation or any form of datafeed is in their best interest. Anyone contacted LinkShare about it?
I think I have a good setup here: http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/stat?id=asr3PDaIFuY&offerid=146261&type=3&subid=0&tmpid=1826&RD_PARM1=itms%253A%252F%252Fphobos.apple.com%252FWebObjects%252FMZSearch.woa%252Fwa%252Fcom.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction%252FadvancedSearchResults%253FartistTerm%253DFuture%20Beat%20Alliance%20%26partnerId%3D30 replace the first two with your linkshare information that you get when you generate your own itunes links. replace the last with your search query. I'm testing it now, just bought a random song and we'll see later if it routed my affiliate information appropriately.
Great question. There is minimal information online on how to do this. But there are two different ways. One is an API (gasp!) and the other is a datafeed. It took me a long long time to figure out either of these but once you know they exist and who to talk to they are pretty easy to use. So for more information about both of these I encourage you to check out the online excerpts from the book I just published about the iTunes Affiliate Program. (http://masteringitunes.com/itunes-affiliate-frequently-asked-questions/) or just buy the book for all the details. ;-) FYI - I liked this question so much that I included it in the book's FAQ.