HERC's Toolbox: MUSIC SMASHER [search engine]

According to Matt Montag (the developer):

Music Smasher is a mash-up of popular music subscription service APIs. I developed it to simplify the task of searching across Spotify, Rdio, Grooveshark, and other catalogs to find out who has the music you love, giving you more information for choosing a streaming service.

According to Eliot Van Buskirk @ evolver.fm:

How is a music fan to know where to go to hear what they’re looking for? Sure, you could search each services individually, but… wasn’t taking care of repetitive tasks like that one of the reasons we built computers in the first place?

Music Smasher doesn’t have all the answers, but it does pretty well. This web app lets you search six music services from a single box: Bandcamp, Grooveshark, MOG, Rdio, SoundCloud, and Spotify. 

Indeed, Music Smasher functions as a front-end to each of these services, and in our testing, each result did in fact lead to a full-length stream, although in some cases, you have to wait for the client software to fire itself up. It’s not quite the “one big database” we’ve been waiting for, but it’s a step in the right direction, where music fans are concerned.

According to HERC:

As a user of Spotify, Grooveshark and SoundCloud, Music Smasher is the first place I go to look for a song. 

What tools do you use to find, discover or listen to music?  Let HERC know in the comments.  And please check back often for more from HERC's Toolbox.