Winamp Lives To Play Another Day

If you owned a computer back in the ’90s, you might have heard of Winamp. It was quite popular, call it the iTunes of the ’90s if you will. This popular music player has been around for quite a long time, but its popularity died down in the mid-2000s, as users were captivated by newer products. AOL, which owned Winamp, had announced its decision to shut down Winamp on December 21st, but it was rumored that perhaps Microsoft might acquire it, which it did not. Instead, as rumored, Radionomy has confirmed its acquisition of Winamp as well as Shoutcast from AOL. The legendary music player lives to play another day.

Radionomy was launched in late 2012, its a free service that lets users generate online radio stations. Shoutcast is an online radio broadcasting service that AOL has sold to Radionomy, which will definitely be using it to further bolster its internet radio services, currently the service has more than 6,000 user programmed online radio stations with over 13 million unique listeners. Alexandre Saboundjian, owner of Radionomy, believes that this acquisition will boost the service’s user base “by a factor of 5 to 10.” They will also be developing new Winamp apps for iOS and Android, which will definitely make us feel nostalgic every time we fire them up on our smartphones. Financial terms of the acquisition have not been revealed, but Belgian publication De Tijd claims that AOL has agreed to take a partial stake in Radionomy as part of a funding round.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Audio
Tags: aol, Social Hit, winamp