When you obtain a legendary brand such as Winamp, the stakes are high.
Operating from the domain Winamp.com, the iconic music player made MP3 music files popular in the late 90’s and early 2000’s but its popularity fell later on and AOL shut it down.
The company was sold twice, first in 1999 to AOL for $80 million dollars, then to Radionomy.
The last stable version of Winamp is 5.666 released in 2013 with version 5.8 being the latest beta release.
In late 2021, Winamp announced that it will be reinventing itself, hinting of a new business model. On March 16th, 2022, a press release by Winamp shared the news of its new model, that is focused on NFT and enabling music artists to monetize their art:
Winamp, the iconic media player, will be launching its new platform in June 2022. Winamp’s mission is to empower creators and fans, to give them more control and transparency over their music ownership and usage, while providing the best listening experience online.
This spring, Winamp is also opening its Foundation to help musicians across the world create music they love. All the funds collected by the Foundation will be redistributed to charity projects supporting music and musicians. On May 16th, the Winamp Foundation will put the original and iconic Winamp skin on auction, as a 1/1 NFT edition. The NFT will be on sale on OpenSea until May 22nd .
This news was not received well by fans of the classic Winamp platform and player, that voiced their opposition to the NFT culture:
Oh no, don’t you dare Winamp. If this is your way to ease into the nft scam, i lost any interest i had in the Winamp revival.
You’re destroying a beloved brand. This is extremely disappointing.
Literally nobody wants this. I’m so behind disappointed at another ponzi scheme attempt. You lost a potential future customer, because now I can’t trust you.
While NFTs enable artists to share and monetize their art, power consumption connected to how blockchain technology operates has led people against it. Fans of the classic Winamp project have moved to WACUP that stands for “WinAmp Community Update Project.”
