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What Happened to Winamp, and Can You Use It Now?

Author: Justin Pot / Source: How-To Geek

Twenty years ago Winamp was the future. Now it’s a distant memory. What happened?

Winamp (Windows Advanced Multimedia Products) came out on April 21, 1997—back when listening to music on computers was a novel concept, and most people didn’t know what “MP3” meant.

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Winamp wasn’t the first PC music player, but it did make it easy to create a playlist: drag files over to the playlist window and start listening. This, combined with early file sharing networks like Napster, changed the way people discovered and listened to music. Winamp rode that wave, growing until it had 90 million users, only to become irrelevant.

Hardly anyone uses Winamp these days. Where did it go? And could you use it today, if you wanted to? Let’s dig in and see what we can find.

What Happened to Winamp?

Winamp was lightweight, customizable, and made listening to music easier than any player that came before it. It quickly became a hit, despite only having a four-person team behind it. Part of the appeal came from the community: a plugin and skin ecosystem allowed designers and developers to customize things in surprising ways, and music nerds loved having that kind of control.

Our story’s ending begins with a buyout, like many other 90s tech stories. In June of 1999, AOL acquired Nullsoft (the company behind Winamp) for $80 million. That’s quite the payout for a four-person team, but AOL never really knew what to do with what they bought. Page views to the Winamp website brought in a big chunk of ad revenue, sure, and thousands of people paid $10 for the Pro version of the software, but that was about it regarding revenue.

AOL, meanwhile, was still making ridiculous sums of money with its infamously sandboxed dial-up service. That massive revenue stream made it hard to prioritize other projects—even those for which AOL paid millions. Eventually, AOL decided software like Winamp was a promotional opportunity for the dial-up service, and soon installing Winamp meant declining offers for “free” AOL subscriptions.

This was a major turnoff for Winamp users. Here’s Cyrus Farivar, writing for Ars Technica in a very good feature about Winamp’s decline: