Winamp faded away in the last decade, and looks to be slowly making a comeback in this decade. In 2024, it relaunched itself as a music player option for mobile devices, but with the added bonus of being able to stream your songs from iCloud or Google Cloud rather than being restricted to just local files. More recently, it appears to be adding streaming, the standard of the current era, into the mix, with a partnership with Deezer to make it happen.

Per the announcement by both companies, the partnership will ultimately power Winamp’s own premium music subscription service. Deezer’s role is to “provide its white-label music streaming technology and global music catalogue” to power the new Winamp Player that’s coming in the first half of 2027. This revamped version of the app “will introduce a completely reimagined listening experience built around a simple ambition: to reinvent the music player for the streaming era”.

In other words, “seamlessly combine premium streaming with users’ local music libraries, internet radio stations, podcasts, personal cloud-based collections and other audio sources”. Naturally, there’s some “new social capabilities” thrown in there as well, because nothing is private and everything must be shared. Winamp also claims that its own “subscription streaming service will deliver a fundamentally different experience from today’s traditional digital streaming platforms, reimagining both the listening experience and the subscription model”.

That sounds about as vague as can be, and the company says that the full details of its refreshed app will only be revealed closer to launch. For what it’s worth, when this new version of the app goes live, Winamp intends to extend these new features to the desktop player as well, including the streaming part. If Winamp is truly serious about “giving users the freedom to experience music their own way”,  as company CEO Alexandre Saboundjian claims in the announcement, there’s an easy way to do it – let us buy songs in unencrypted, lossless file formats.

(Source: Winamp, Deezer)

Updated 2:34 pm, Fri, 31 July 26