Winamp was acquired by Radionomy and the Llama lives on

by Michael Black on 17 February 2014 · 3130 views

A few weeks ago, the future for our beloved media player Winamp, was questionable. In-fact, it was pretty much a guarantee that AOL would be shutting down all Winamp related operations, and no longer supporting the software. Now, it shouldn't be any surprise that AOL would fail in yet another project, but Winamp has always been a fantastic program -- and clearly Radionomy agrees with that statement. The company (Radionomy) that deals primarily with digital audio related business, has purchased both Winamp and Shoutcast from AOL, at the cost of 12% of their entire company, and a dollar amount somewhere between 5 and 10 million.

This is big news for any major Winamp supporters, especially because there's a huge chance the program will finally get the attention it deserves. Seeing as the program has been around since the early 90's, and has managed to become a household shortly after it's conception, there's no reason why it shouldn't be at least half of the cash cow iTunes is.

The most recent Winamp UI

However, it's pretty clear that AOL has majorly failed the potential of Winamp ever since their acquisition of the program in the year 1999. It was reported that AOL paid Nullsoft (the original developer), over $80 million for the rights to the software. Now, a decade and a half later, they're only receiving about 10% of their investment in return (not including the share in Radionomy). After acquiring these two software titles, Radionomy has already hinted that they have some big plans for improving and updating both Winamp and Shoutcast.

Despite the lack of effort from AOL, Winamp is still receiving massive amounts of downloads, equating to roughly 3 million per month. If you head over to the Radionomy website, you can see they are pretty excited about the acquisition, and displaying both Winamp and Shoutcast on their main page.