The MP3 period’s favourite participant returns with a month-to-month subscription.
Winamp, the endlessly skinnable MP3 participant that dominated Home windows desktops within the pre-streaming period, is making a comeback subsequent 12 months, however not as it. In a partnership with Deezer, Winamp shall be reborn as a totally new participant with its personal premium subscription service, with Deezer offering the white-label streaming expertise and licensed catalog.
Based on the official announcement, the brand new participant will add that subscription alongside native recordsdata, Web radio, podcasts and cloud-stored music libraries. The brand new participant will sit alongside the basic desktop app fairly than change it: Winamp claims the unique nonetheless has greater than 40 million lively customers worldwide, and the identical Deezer-powered subscription shall be added after launch.
A mutually helpful association
Deezer reported a decline in new subscriptions from accomplice offers in its first half 2026 monetary outcomes. They fell to three.1 million, down some 800,000 12 months over 12 months primarily based on some fast math. Income from that partnerships section dropped 7.6 % to 70.7 million euros as a bundling cope with LATAM retail big Mercado Libre wound down. Deezer informed buyers in April that rebuilding this facet of the enterprise via white-label offers is a acknowledged strategic precedence, with latest segments protecting Telenor and French vitality provider EDF.
Deezer signed the Winamp deal on July 1, weeks earlier than the official announcement, and offered it to buyers as a part of its revamped Deezer for Enterprise program. This white-label association will see Deezer working the streaming infrastructure and supplying the catalog, whereas Winamp retains full possession of the core product, its branding and subscriber relationship. All sides brings what the opposite wants, since Winamp has no music licenses and no streaming infrastructure, whereas Deezer will get the most important model but to plug into its white-label program.
Winamp has promised this earlier than
Alexandre Saboundjian, then CEO of Winamp proprietor Radioomy and now CEO of Winamp Group, informed TechCrunch in October 2018 {that a} fully new Winamp would launch the next 12 months. He promised “a extra full listening expertise” spanning dwelling, MP3s, cloud libraries, podcasts and streaming radio stations. That streaming-friendly revival deliberate for 2019 by no means got here. The plan was reliant on pulling third-party streaming providers right into a single app, an method that might’ve required integration offers Winamp by no means introduced. The 2027 Deezer-Winamp partnership sidesteps that drawback fully by bundling Winamp’s service with Deezer’s licensing and streaming infrastructure on day one.
We did ultimately see a refreshed model of your dad and mom’ favourite MP3 software program three years later in 2022, adopted by a rocker stretch of name stewardship. Winamp printed the basic participant’s supply code on GitHub in September 2024 below a customized license that originally barred anybody from distributing forks. All the repo was deleted just a few weeks later, after the license attracted sustained criticism and proprietary code belonging to Dolby and Microsoft was discovered.
Winamp hasn’t supplied any particulars on pricing or supported platforms but, regardless of promising a subscription mannequin that is “essentially completely different” from at this time’s streaming providers. The press launch commits to a customizable interface, social options and new instruments for locating and organizing music, with extra product previews promised within the coming months.
For the primary time in its close to 30-year historical past, Winamp shall be providing a premium subscription. Ought to the Deezer partnership show profitable, it’s going to be fairly the rebound for a service that AOL had deliberate to close down in 2013 earlier than promoting it off to Radionomy.