As you may already know, Grooveshark’s Android app was recently <a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20051156-261.htm”>pulled from the Android market</a> due to either label pressure, or concerns from its competing music service that is soon to be launched (or both). That event has been covered in great detail all over the net, so I won’t rehash it here; that’s not what this blog post is about.
Yesterday we discovered that Grooveshark has also been pulled from the Chrome Web Store. Fortunately, if you already installed Grooveshark, Google does not appear to be revoking the app from users Chrome home pages. 
For users who had not yet installed Grooveshark, they are out of luck from the web store. However, we have discovered that it is possible to “jail break” your Chrome installation to get the full Grooveshark + Chrome experience.
Step 1: Visit http://grooveshark.com in your chrome browser.
Step 2: Close the Grooveshark tab.
Step 3: Open the New Tab tab by typing CTRL+T (CMD+T in OSX?), or by pressing on the small + icon next to the rightmost tab.
Step 4: If Grooveshark appears under “Most visited,” simply drag it to the top-left position, hover over the site preview for a second, and click on the pin icon that appears. Skip to step 7.
Step 5: If Grooveshark does not appear under Most visited, scroll down to Recently closed, and click on Grooveshark.
Step 6: Proceed to step 1.
Step 7: Collapse the Apps section, or remove it entirely.
It may take several thousand iterations of this loop to bring Grooveshark into your Most visited section depending on how obsessively you are checking the 8 websites that appear there for you, but we feel this added effort on your part is well worth it. When you are done Chrome should look something like this:
P.S.: Grooveshark was ranked #8, right behind YouTube, an interesting juxtaposition since these services are both powered by user contributed content, and are both legal, but one is owned by Google and the other is not.
P.P.S.: For those of you who are really bad at detecting sarcasm, I am being facetious. As with every blog post I make here, I also am not speaking for Grooveshark in any sort of official capacity.
ilbalta
April 17, 2011 at 11:22 am
Hi there!
This is very sad, first android market then chrome web store.
I’m very disappointed with google’s behavior… it seems the old “google is not evil” motto is long gone :(
However, I found it to be simpler to just reinstall the app from another source which (I suppose) cannot be removed by google (just link installing third parties software in your android device: these ones can’t be remotely disabled by google).
I got the app from here: http://bitdrive.net/get/CM8og1302289621/1303056904/Grooveshark.crx
It installs fine and works, I still haven’t tested if it correctly syncs between multiple devices linked to my google account.
Hope to see the official version back up as soon as possible.
Please keep us updated also on grooveshark’s official twitter and tumblr.
Bye.
<3
Dale
April 24, 2011 at 6:18 pm
You can also run Chrome in ‘app mode’ via the command-line (not really the same as the normal Chrome apps, but still pretty cool).
google-chrome –app=http://grooveshark.com
Jan
May 17, 2011 at 3:24 pm
1. Download following file: http://www.mediafire.com/?1pnu1m7d450uvbn
2. This archive contains a folder ‘Grooveshark’. Unpack this folder.
3. Open Chrome, go to the wrench menu and click ‘Tools’ > ‘Extensions’.
4. click ‘Developer mode’ on the top right.
5. Click ‘Load Unpacked Extension’ and navigate to the unzipped Grooveshark folder. Click OK
6. Enjoy your ‘full Grooveshark + Chrome experience’.