Search

Use the search field in the top right hand corner of iTunes. When you have the iTunes Store selected in the pane on the left side of the iTunes window, this field switches from searching your library to searching the store. A simple search will return anything that matches what you typed in – songs, albums, videos, movies, etc.

Type the name of that song you're looking for here.

You can narrow the results you got to a particular type of content by selecting it from the pull-down menu on the top-left corner of the iTunes Store.

If you’re still having trouble finding the needle you’re looking for in the haystack of results, click on the Power Search button. This will give you very specific control over what you’re searching for.

Limit your search to whatever type of content you select here.

Browse

You’re probably familiar with iTunes’s browse mode from looking through your library. Browse is the mode where you’ll have three columns for Genre, Artist, and Album above the list of songs in your library. It is turned on by selecting Show Browser from the View menu. This works for your library or the iTunes Store. With the iTunes Store, the number of columns and what they hold will change. For instance, if you’d like to find a music video by the First Lady of France, just select Music Videos from the first column, French Pop from the next one, and Carla Bruni from the last column. Then you’ll see the video for her song “L’amoureuse.”

Popularity

Whenever you’re looking around in the iTunes Store, you’ll see the Popularity column. This can be a big help if you’re looking at an album with a lot of tracks on it, or if you got a few more results than you expected when you searched for “Landslide.” Click on the column header labeled Popularity and you should see an arrow pointing downward appear in the header. You’ll then see all of the items sorted with the most popular downloads at the top. You can see an example of this up above in the browsing screenshot. This will usually help you find what it is you’re looking for unless you have particularly eclectic tastes.

Arrows

Apple puts little arrows to the right of song titles, artist names, and album titles when you have a song selected. You’ll see them for other fields too, but they always do the same thing. They’ll take you directly to the search results for the item you have selected. This is great if, say, you’re enjoying “Belief” off of the Continuum from John Mayer and would like more from that album or maybe you’re watching a great episode of Battlestar Galactica and would like to watch another.

Genius

Finally, one of the newest features of iTunes is Genius. It has two parts, Genius Playlists and the Genius Sidebar. The sidebar is what will help you find new stuff on the iTunes Store. If you don’t see the Genius Sidebar on the right side of your iTunes window, you can turn it on by selecting Show Genius Sidebar from the View menu.

If I select “Love Missile F1-11” from my library (hey, it’s a song from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), the Genius Sidebar will give me a link to their Complete My Album feature for this album so that I can either buy more songs from it or buy the rest of the album minus what I’ve already spent on tracks off it. It will also tell me that Sigue Sigue Sputnik‘s top album on the store is Dress for Excess and it’ll show a few of their most popular songs. If the song you’ve selected is a part of any of the collections iTunes has assembled, those will show up here. This song happens to be a member of their Synth Pop iTunes Essentials. The sidebar will also give you some recommendations, at the top of the list for “Love Missile F1-11″ is “The Edge of Forever” by The Dream Academy. That song was also in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and iTunes is recommending it to me even though John Hughes didn’t want the movie to have an official soundtrack.