14 DAY TRIAL // Grooveshark is facing some grim legal charges and battles ahead, but the site is still operating as usual. Since this type of lawsuits tend to take years, it's a safe bet that Grooveshark will be around longer. For the cheapskate music lover or for those who don't have any other alternative in their countries, it's a great way of discovering and listening to as much music as you possibly can.
Well, as long as you're on a computer with an internet connection. But what if you want to listen to music in your car, on your MP3 player or simply feel better if you know the music you like is sitting neatly in your local collection? Well, that's where tools like Grooveshark Downloader come in.
Like the name suggests, the Chrome extension adds a download link to any song on Grooveshark. It's against the terms of service and it may be illegal, but that's not stopping anyone.
What's interesting though is that the tool is sitting nicely in the Chrome Web Store, anyone can install it and start downloading within seconds.
Normally, tools like this don't last long in the Web Store. YouTube downloaders get taken down as soon as they're published. The YouTube "downloaders" that you'll find in the Web Store now are all fake.
Not so with Grooveshark. The obvious question is, why? And it has an obvious answer too, because no one has complained about it.
Google is not going to police the Web Store for extensions that may or may not go against the terms of service of various other sites. And the company says that it has received no complaints about this specific extension.
Where it gets really interesting though is the part where Grooveshark told Evolver.fm that it has actually filed a complaint with Google about the extension and others like it. But it says Google hasn't complied, so far.
Obviously, both of them can't be right, one of them is lying. Evolver.fm leaves the speculation to its readers and that's probably the best idea.
Interestingly, it seems that the initial extension was eventually removed from the Web Store, though it's unclear whether this was done by Google or the original author. But don't fret, the tool went right back up and it was still available at the time of writing.
