Winamp at 29: From Llama to Legacy Player, and What Comes Next

Winamp, the free player that taught a generation to keep their own music files, is coming back in 2027 as a streaming subscription.

The music behind it will come from Deezer, a streaming service that now says more than half of its new daily uploads are made by AI.

Meanwhile, Winamp's own sister company is in court with two big AI firms over the music used to train them.

Here is what was announced, how Winamp got here in 29 years, and what it means for the music files on your PC.

What Winamp Actually Announced

• A Winamp-branded subscription. Deezer supplies the streaming technology and its music catalogue, and Winamp designs the app around it.
• A rebuilt player in the first half of 2027. It will mix streaming with your own music library, internet radio, podcasts and personal cloud storage in one place.
• Still unknown. Price, which devices it runs on, and whether it streams in lossless quality have not been announced.

Winamp says more than 40 million people still use its free desktop player. As TechCrunch noted, the big question is whether people will pay for one more music subscription next to Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music.

How a Free Player Taught Everyone to Own Their Music

The first version came out on 21 April 1997, written by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev. It was small, fast and free, and it played the new MP3 files that people were ripping from their CDs.

In 1998 a short demo track added the line everyone still remembers: "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass". Skins, plug-ins and playlists turned a music folder into something that felt like yours.

• 1999: AOL bought Winamp's maker, Nullsoft, for 80 million dollars in stock. By 2001 the player had about 60 million users.
• 2013 and 2014: AOL announced it would shut Winamp down, then sold it to the Belgian radio company Radionomy.
• 2018 to 2023: a few late updates arrived, ending with Winamp 5.9.2 in April 2023, still the last official desktop release.
• 2024: Winamp put part of its source code online in September, then deleted it a few weeks later after criticism of the licence.
• 2025: the parent company, Llama Group, renamed itself Winamp Group.

The AI Problem Waiting on the Other Side

Deezer says fully AI-generated tracks passed half of all new daily uploads in June 2026, around 90,000 tracks a day. They still make up only 1-3% of what people actually listen to.

According to Deezer's own figures, up to 85% of plays on those AI tracks in 2025 were fake streams. Deezer tags AI music, keeps it out of recommendations, and plans a switch to hide it completely by the end of 2026.

Winamp Group also owns Jamendo, a library of free-to-use music. In June 2026 Jamendo sued Nvidia and then the AI music app Suno in the US, saying both trained AI models on a Jamendo research collection of more than 55,000 tracks without a commercial licence.

Suno says training on music is fair use, and neither case has been decided. Music Business Worldwide has the full details of both claims.

What This Means for Your Music Files

Nothing changes on your PC today. Your MP3, FLAC and AAC files are yours, and no streaming launch can take them away.

If you miss the classic look, WACUP is a free community-built player based on Winamp 5. It keeps the skins and plug-ins and gets regular updates.

For a modern library player, foobar2000 is light and endlessly tweakable, and MusicBee is friendlier if you want it to look good out of the box.

• Still have CDs? Exact Audio Copy rips them to files that sound identical to the disc.
• Messy library? Mp3tag fixes song names, album art and track numbers in bulk.

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