14 DAY TRIAL // While the world is all about Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and other streaming services nowadays, there was a time when everybody just wanted (and had no option than) to play their own music libraries.
Those were the days when Winamp was the number one media player out there, with millions of users on Windows and macOS turning to this app to handle their large music libraries.
The Winamp usage peaked at 60 million users in 2001 at a time when it was pretty much the most popular media player on Windows.
While we won’t discuss the versions of Winamp and the updates that the app received, it’s worth emphasizing that the first version actually launched 23 years ago in April 1997. But the most successful release was Winamp 2, which was released only a year later and which everybody just loved.
It came with support for skins and plug-ins, playlists, visualization, and so much more, and this eventually turned it into a must-have app on Windows. The popularity of Winamp skyrocketed on Windows 98 and Windows XP, especially thanks to its skin support and the growing community of devs creating them.
As a quick timeline of Winamp, here’s when each major release was launched:
- Winamp 1: June 7, 1997
- Winamp 2: September 8, 1998
- Winamp 2.10: March 24, 1999
- Winamp 3: August 9, 2002
- Winamp 5.0: December 2003
- Winamp 5.5: October 10, 2007
- Winamp 5.66: November 20, 2013
- Winamp 5.8: October 26, 2016
But the transition from local media players to streaming services isn’t the only one that killed off Winamp. It’s actually a series of ownership changes mixed with bad decisions and poor releases that turned Winamp into a legend which no longer had a place in a modern world.
Winamp is the creation of University of Utah students Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev. Frankel founded Nullsoft in 1997 to continue the development of Winamp, only to sell the company to AOL on June 1, 1999.
While the development of Winamp continued under AOL’s umbrella, with Nullsoft becoming the division that was responsible for app updates, the first major turning point took place in 2004 when the team that made the whole project happen decided to leave the company.
Since then, the development of Winamp barely advanced – as a matter of fact, when the Nullsoft team retired, Winamp was already at version 5, the same that’s still around these days with a few revisions.
In 2013, AOL officially announced its intention to kill off Winamp. The website was supposed to shut down, with the app set to go dark in December the same year. This was seen by many as the end of Winamp, as everybody knew that without an owner that’s fully committed to long-term development, it was pretty much impossible for the media player to survive.
Fortunately, Radionomy, a Belgian company that showed up out of nowhere, decided to take over Winamp and keep the application alive, promising major updates and new features in the coming years.
Only one version was released under Radionomy’s umbrella though. Winamp 5.8 launched in October 2018, nearly five years after the company took over the application, and the whole thing happened after a leaked build reached the web through unofficial channels. The biggest change in this update was full support for Windows 10.
Since then, we’ve only been provided with teasers and promises that Winamp would return at some point with even more advanced features.
The official website, for example, looks abandoned as well, as no update has been published in the last two years or so. Radionomy still claims “our teams are currently working hard on Winamp with the intention to make it a player of today,” but it goes without saying nobody believes it anymore.
“We are currently working hard of a future new Winamp,” Radionomy says.
As a matter of fact, Radionomy’s CEO officially announced Winamp 6 in October 2018, but here we are nearly two years later with not even a single new build of the refreshed media player.
At the end of the day, it just looks like Winamp being transferred from one owner to another is what eventually killed the app. Who knows where Winamp would be today if the Nullsoft team hadn’t left in 2004...