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Winamp lives on after acquisition by Radionomy

Winamp lives on after acquisition by Radionomy

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Winamp logo stock
Winamp logo stock

Winamp, the popular music player of the late ‘90s and early 2000s, was supposed to shut down on December 21st, but it has lived on into 2014. Following rumors of a potential Microsoft acquisition, Radionomy confirms that it has acquired the media player from its owner AOL along with Shoutcast, an internet radio broadcasting service that AOL also owned. The precise details of the deal are not public, but the Belgian publication De Tijd reports that AOL took a partial stake in Radionomy as part of a recent funding round.

The confirmation comes after Winamp forum users spotted that the DNS entries for winamp.com had been switched to Radionomy’s own servers last month. Radionomy launched in late 2012 as a free service to generate online radio stations. It has around 6,000 user-programmed radio stations with 13 million unique listeners. Speaking with De Tijd, Radionomy owner Alexandre Saboundjian says he believes the service's user count will "increase by a factor of 5 to 10" thanks to the acquisition. To help it reach that lofty goal, the company is developing new Winamp apps for iOS and Android that will be released later this year.

Aaron Souppouris contributed to this article.