AOL is close to selling Winamp to Radionomy, according to news reports, as one of the first music streaming firms looks to find a new lease of life to compete with the likes of Spotify and iTunes Radio.
AOL’s planned shutdown of Winamp was met by protest from users of the 16-year-old software.
Now,TechCrunch has reported that both Winamp and streaming software Shoutcast are being acquired by Radionomy.
Winamp’s name servers were transferred from AOL to Radionomy yesterday, as noted by TheNextWeb and others.
Neither AOL nor Radionomy issued official comments on this, but Winamp forum members have reportedly spotted that Winamp’s nameservers have been quietly transferred to Radionomy, which means that an agreement may already be in place.
At the time of writing this article, the Winamp retirement announcement is still there on the official website of the media player.
“Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013.
Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release. Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years,” the announcement reads.
According to some previous reports, Microsoft itself was interested in purchasing Winamp, even though it was a bit surprising given the fact that Redmond continues to invest a fortune in Windows Media Player and Xbox Music.
Similar to Pandora, Radionomy lets users create their own radio stations and claims 13 million unique users. TechCrunch speculates that “Winamp’s media playing software could be used to help program those radio stations and offer additional services.”
Winamp and Shoutcast were both developed by Nullsoft, a company purchased by AOL in June 1999.