Music Smasher is one of those rare, fun sites that someone directs you to or you stumble onto, and you have no idea what to do with it. At first, you stare blankly.
There’s no big colorful buttons to be pressed, just a ‘smash’ button that, while enticing, could do who knows what. When you figure out that you’re supposed to type in a music search, that’s when it becomes fun.
Music Smasher specializes in the search for esoteric or less-well-known music, so if there’s a band you have been searching for all this time and had no luck, Music Smasher might have something for you.
From the first moment you log onto the site, it’s pretty clear this is going to be all about results. On the main page is a simple search box, followed by a listing of the various search engine sites used by Music Smasher, and of course the Smash button. This is where you will get the results for any searches you enter into the main window. It can be a surprise, however, and it made me jump out of my skin the first time I used it so be warned.
Once you’ve typed your search into the box, each different site connected to Music Smasher will go through its available database and return results in the form of URL addresses linking to that particular search result. You might not find the song or artist you are looking for on one site but it may appear on another or two others, etc. The major advantage with sites like Music Smasher is the ability to be able to search multiple sites at one time with a minimum of fuss. This concept has become the standard, it seems, for search engine enhancements. Music Smasher is a good example of this concept taken to a focused level, specifically designed to search for music in particular. While you might find many of the same results using a standard engine like Google.com or something similar, the sites connected to Music Smasher are meant to find music specifically, which ostensibly improves the results and the likelihood that you’ll find more of the really obscure stuff there. I typed in about thirty different bands or song that I consider to be obscure and relatively unknown, and got at least four hits for each and every one of them.
The hits themselves were pretty well on target too, without giving me a lot of generic links to sites that basically send you on a wild goose chase of connected search engines without ever getting any real information as a result. That in itself is unusual in this kind of site and worth mentioning as a major reason to use it, not just as a rarity. While I didn’t find each result to be one hundred percent useful, they were all, at least, accurate in that they had some mention or connection to the music I was searching for. I have to imagine these numbers will go up on a curve, the more searches are entered, but in any case the experience was satisfactory for what the site offers. There’s even an option to search US music sources only, or global. So, if you’re after some tunes that are tough to track down, head over to Music Smasher and see what you can dig up out there in cyber space. It might just be that song that’s been stuck in your head for twenty years now. Until next time, my friends.
[Thanks to user Panzer for the tip about this service]
Check out Music Smasher here.
B.C. Tietjens
