Winamp

~ remembering ~

Winamp was developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev at the age of nineteen and twenty respectively. It was first released as Winamp 0.20a on April 21, 1997. Winamp 2.x, released in March 1998, became the dominant Windows MP3 player of the late 90s and early 2000s. Nullsoft, the company behind it, was bought by AOL in 1999 for $80 million.

On December 20, 2013, AOL announced that Winamp would be shut down. The website would close. Downloads would end. The product would be retired. The internet revolted. AOL backtracked. Winamp was sold to a Belgian audio company called Radionomy. Versions of Winamp have continued to exist since, including a 2018 announcement of a comeback that was a comeback in name only, and a 2024 open-source release. None of these revived the original cultural moment.

~ by the numbers ~

Born	21 April 1997
Killed (announcement)	20 December 2013
Killed (revoked)	14 January 2014
Peak users	~90 million (2002)
Bought by	AOL, 1999, $80 million
Iconic catchphrase	"It really whips the llama's ass", the splash sound

~ the skins ~

Winamp 2.x's killer feature was skinning, though the default interface was a skeumorphic representation of a small audio component; a little black-and-grey rectangle with a clean equaliser and a playlist window. But you could replace this entire interface with a custom skin, downloaded from one of dozens of skin galleries.

Skins took every form imaginable: pixel-perfect recreations of the original Star Trek LCARS interface, anime-character-themed players, a skin that made Winamp look like a brick of cheese, a skin that made the play button a cat's face, a skin that was an entire interactive scene from a Final Fantasy game. The Winamp skin community was, briefly in the early 2000s, one of the most active design communities on the internet.

A teenager could spend an entire Saturday afternoon installing thirty skins and trying each one. The act of finding the perfect skin was a ritual of self-expression on a Windows PC where almost nothing else could be customised.

~ the visualisations ~

The Milkdrop visualizer, written by Ryan Geiss and shipped with Winamp 5, was for many users their first encounter with computational visual art. Audio-reactive psychedelic patterns rendered in real time; many millennials had a Milkdrop full-screen window running in the background while doing homework in 2003. It was, in some real sense, the screensaver of the soul.

~ cause of death ~

Winamp's slow death began with the AOL buyout in 1999. Justin Frankel left Nullsoft in 2004, citing the corporate environment and AOL's interference. Without him, Winamp lost direction. iTunes shipped on Windows in 2003 and quickly became the default music player for the iPod-using majority. WMP shipped with Windows. Foobar2000 took the audiophile niche. Winamp was squeezed.

By 2010 Winamp was a software relic, beloved but unmaintained, running on millions of computers but receiving little engineering attention. The 2013 shutdown announcement was the formal recognition of what had already happened.

The 2014 sale to Radionomy was supposed to revive Winamp as a streaming radio platform. It did not. Several "comeback" announcements have been made since (2018, 2022, 2024, each promising a modern Winamp reborn for the streaming era). None has materialised meaningfully. The Winamp brand is now a slow-rotating logo on a website nobody visits.

~ the hole it left ~

The personal music library as a discrete thing. Winamp organised your local mp3 collection. The collection was a thing you owned, on a hard drive, indexed by ID3 tags you had personally edited. Streaming services have replaced this with rented access to a catalogue. The relationship is different.

The customisable music player. Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music: none of them allow user skinning. The interface is what the company decides. Winamp let you make the interface yourself. The closest modern survivors are Foobar2000 and a few open-source players, used by a tiny fraction of music listeners.

The visualizer. Milkdrop full-screen, running in the background, audio-reactive. Spotify's "canvas" feature is its faded shadow. The full ambient art experience is gone.

~ what people said ~

"i still hear 'it really whips the llama's ass' in my head when i open spotify in 2026. spotify never says anything when it opens. that is the ailment of the modern app.". a.k. 39

"my entire music collection from 1999 to 2008 was tagged by hand in winamp's id3 editor. when i moved to streaming, those tags meant nothing. they were a private archaeology nobody else can read." - o.b. 42

"a friend of mine wrote a winamp skin in the shape of a working microwave oven in 2003. i still want a copy. it does not exist anywhere. these things are gone the moment we stop talking about them.". i.ç. 38