Not without screwing up the way the partitions get re-created when you perform an upgrade, if I recall correctly. The other option is to use the developer partition and mount it as /programs0. That's not a huge amount of space though, and the mount point has to be re-created each time you do an upgrade.
There are a lot of advantages to putting your apps on the music partition. For really large user apps (such as the map data for GPSapp+Roadmap), the only place there's enough room is on the music partition. And the only way something will fully survive an upgrade is to put it on the music partition.
Personally, I just make all the third party stuff run in @DC mode only, so that I never have to worry about shutting it off before I sync. All my third party programs survive through upgrades, and I never have trouble synching.