The Apple Blog notes that in iTunes 9 Smart Playlists Are Now Smarter , in particular, you can now mix and match the ALL and ANY match operators, so you can say that I want all 4+ rated songs from any of these x,y,z artists. Previously you could only apply either the AND or the ANY operator to smart playlist rules, and you had to hack things (ie: create a separate playlist of your ANY artists and then another one that uses the source as that playlist, and then apply the ALL rule). Or something like that. Look at the screenshot and you'll be happy if you've made a lot of iTunes smart playlists :)