Winamp, a popular media player from the 90s, is getting a serious makeover, the company announced on Wednesday. The plans also include a strategic partnership with music streaming service Deezer to make the upcoming release an all-in-one media player for all of your music and podcasts, whether streaming or local.
This isn’t the first time the player has attempted a comeback — in 2019, it returned in the form of a mobile app, but now it’s going all out again for another return to the world.
The Winamp media player was originally released in 1997 and was known for its customization, including skins, as well as a popular music visualization feature. However, as the world leaned more heavily toward streaming, Winamp became less of a household name and was relegated to the ’90s kids who loved it so.
According to the announcement, the new release has one mission: to reinvent the music player for the streaming era. That’s certainly a tall order, especially with the likes of the already massively popular streaming services in existence today. Even if the service was free, most people likely wouldn’t stray from Spotify or Apple Music.
The new Winamp will integrate a user’s local music library along with a massive digital music catalog from Deezer. This will also include internet radio stations, podcasts, personal cloud-based collections and other audio sources. The player will apparently be highly customizable — something we’d expect from Winamp — and include social features for music discovery.
While the service will be a paid subscription, the press release says that it will deliver a “fundamentally different experience,” and that it will “reimagine both the listening experience and the subscription model.”
Nostalgic Winamp users may indeed be interested in the upcoming release, but the company faces an uphill battle to woo users away from existing platforms. It remains to be seen if the player itself can be used without a subscription to play local music libraries. Even then, the number of people maintaining massive libraries of MP3s and other music files is likely far smaller than it was when Winamp was first released.
The new Winamp app experience will be released in the first half of 2027. No pricing has yet been announced.
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