This is one of those “well, of course” things, but the capability to view composer data in the iTunes Music Store wasn’t obvious to me. But it’s so necessary if you’re looking at classical recordings. I was curious as to whether any of Yo Yo Ma’s work with contemporary composers was on his new Appassionata album, but couldn’t be sure from the displayed track names. So on a hunch, I used the View Options to turn on the composer column and there was the information I was looking for right in the store display.
Of course, the ability to browse by composers in the column browser is still missing, and you have to use the Power Search feature to search by composers. But the information is there.
This is what frustrates me about having more than 20,000 tracks in iTunes. Even though the options to store tons of metadata are present, you can’t do a text search by composer, or comment field, or whatever. But you can display the data!