Winamp’s userbase declined, and by 2013 AOL decided to shut it down entirely. Apple took the music player market and ran with it (and then spent 15 years turning iTunes into the cluttered mess we all hate today.)
Winamp tried to fight this by offering unofficial support for transferring music to an iPod, but it wasn’t enough. Winamp offered thousands of fan-created themes and plugins iTunes wasn’t really customizable at all.Ī lot of geeks preferred Winamp, but iTunes appealed to a much bigger audience who just wanted to rip a bunch of CDs and listen to them. Winamp was made up of several windows iTunes only had one. And while Winamp’s interface was a bit cluttered, the iTunes interface (at least at the time) was clean and easy to use. It could identify and rip your CDs in just a couple of clicks. Everyone who bought an iPod switched to iTunes for listening to music, because iTunes was more-or-less required for loading up an iPod with music-and a lot of people bought iPods.Įven if you didn’t own an iPod, iTunes was attractive. By 2003 iTunes came out for the PC and that was the beginning of the end for Winamp. In 2001 Apple launched the iPod, and it caught on in a big way.
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primary users were music fans, geeks, and people who cared about what bitrate their MP3s were encoded at-in other words, the key users of Winamp in the early 2000s were allergic to AOL as a company.īundling AOL software and offers with Winamp cheapened the software in users’ eyes. Here’s Cyrus Farivar, writing for Ars Technica in a very good feature about Winamp’s decline: This was a major turnoff for Winamp users. 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. That massive revenue stream made it hard to prioritize other projects-even those for which AOL paid millions. RELATED: RIP AIM, the Messaging App AOL Never WantedĪOL, meanwhile, was still making ridiculous sums of money with its infamously sandboxed dial-up service.
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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.
That’s quite the payout for a four-person team, but AOL never really knew what to do with what they bought. In June of 1999, AOL acquired Nullsoft (the company behind Winamp) for $80 million. Our story’s ending begins with a buyout, like many other 90s tech stories.
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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. It quickly became a hit, despite only having a four-person team behind it. Winamp was lightweight, customizable, and made listening to music easier than any player that came before it.
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