AOL has announced that Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Winamp was one of the first widely installed MP3 players and became available in 1997. The software was originally developed by Nullsoft and AOL purchased it in 1999. AOL combined it with a music download service but it could never compete with Spotify or iTunes.
Besides playback of audio files, Winamp started to support video. Winamp also became popular due to their Shoutcast service which allowed everyone to start their own internet radio station. At its peak the software was installed on more than 60 million computers. For many users the end of Winamp marks the end of an era.
The era where we users started to download and listen to MP3 files instead of only CDs. Back then MP3 files were much more special and the slower connections usually meant waiting half an hour before a song was download.
The last version AOL makes available is 5.66 and besides stopping development of Winamp, AOL will also no longer make the software available for download past the 20th of December this year.
