Music Smasher: Search Grooveshark, MOG, Rdio, Spotify and More, Simultaneously

Guest post by Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.

Music services sometimes issue press releases when their catalogs break certain thresholds — 10 million tracks, 12 million tracks, and so on. But they never mention it when a certain artist, album, or song disappears from their catalogs, which happens as licensing contracts end, or when musicians reconsider the wisdom of licensing their music to unlimited services.

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. All of them have APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces; by tapping into those, developer Matt Montag was able to build this powerful app, which he presented at Music Hack Day San Francisco [updated: a former colleague informs us that Music Smasher has been around since late last year or possibly earlier, so Montag didn't build all of it at MHD SF].

"I developed it to simplify the task of searching across Spotify, Rdio, Grooveshark, MOG, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp to find out who has the music you like," writes Montag. "Results are almost all linked to playable tracks."

Indeed, Music Smasher (direct link) 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.