Winamp, the 90’s legend MP3 software player, is shutting down on December 20 as people are not listening to music via MP3 downloads anymore.
According to the statement made by its makers, the entire web services will shut down and the desktop player will no longer be available for download. The announcement itself was a whimper—a small banner notification on the Winamp website—rather than a bang, and the end seems sadly appropriate.
The media player was all the rage at the turn of the century, but barely made a peep since being acquired by AOL for 80 million US dollars in 1999.
Winamp released an Android version in 2010 and Winamp Sync for Mac, including a full player, launched in 2011 – there was never a clear sense of what was going on with the product. Winamp ruled the days of Napster, a music-focused online service which was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files, typically music, encoded in MP3 format.
In an interview with Ars Technica last year, Rob Lord, the first general manager of Winamp said that he believed that “there’s no reason that Winamp couldn’t be in the position that iTunes is in today if not for a few layers of mismanagement by AOL that started immediately upon acquisition.”
Winamp’s problems that lead to its end was, it could not cope with modern rivals such as iTunes and streaming media services such as Spotify and Pandora which dominate today's music scene. Winamp was just too niche in today’s cross-platform, pay-as-you-go world, though the software still reportedly made money right up until the end.
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