Before we begin...
If you ran into this and you already want to say "But it plays my mp3s", cool, you can ignore this and move on.
For everyone else, here's a small recap from 2013-2025 of what Llama Group did, and what they didn't.
A lot of it is really muddy as time has gone on (because I started on this way later than I really should have), so it's possible that I'm missing or misremembering things, either because these things are now harder or impossible to find, or because things have become a blur.
On the 20th of November 2013, AOL announced the shut down of Winamp, effectively pulling the plug on it. Winamp 5.666 Build 3516 was released on the 12th December that same year.
There was a lot of uncertainty about the future of Winamp and a lot of rumors were going around of companies interested in buying both Winamp and SHOUTcast, including Microsoft, though that turned out to be false.
I couldn't find any information about AOL wanting to sell Winamp to another party, only that companies were in talks with them, at least (then) Radionomy was very interested.
The sale was completed on the 17th of January 2014, and on the 30th of that month, the contents of the Winamp homepage were replaced with a "There's more coming soon" blurb.
During this period, Winamp underwent a logo change, from the lightning bolt surrounded by a white with a black outlined rotated square, to a very simplistic lightning bolt.
It was also during this time that CEO of (then) Radionomy, Alexandre Saboundjian made promises of a supposed "Winamp 6", or whatever the next Winamp was meant to be. (I know for certain that this was talked about, I just couldn't find the related articles for this again.)
Out of seemingly nowhere, on the 16th September 2018 a beta build of Winamp 5.8 build 3653 had found its way on the internet, it is currently not known who leaked it or where it appeared in the first place, though there are rumors that Radionomy was testing the waters just to see what the reaction would be.
Radionomy then responded by leaking their own build (Winamp 5.8 build 3660) on the 19th October the same year, also stating that "This version is not an ongoing project[...]", which should have been the final nail in the coffin.
... except that wasnt the end of that, not yet at least. As it turns out, they were willing to put the brand back on life support, only in a sad attempt to make money. Their shtick at the time consisted of selling a screenshot of Winamp 1.00 as an NFT. Any traces of this ever happening seem to have been wiped, so this one remaining announcement on Llama Group's website is all that remains.
I can't find any reports of any of it succeeding, or if anything came of their little contest, but it can be assumed it was a failure to get any sort of revenue.
At the same time, they also launched their "Winamp Foundation", supposedly helping artists in some way (which, from what I understand, all proceeds from that contest were supposed to go to it and "music charity projects"), which has long since died too.
No one was expecting it, everyone already lost hope, but on the 26th of July 2022, Winamp 5.9 RC1 somehow managed to release. But it wasn't without issues of course, so many that it may even be worse than Winamp3, which says a lot.
Maybe I'll make a dedicated list on what the issues were...
Despite the fact that it took them ~4 years to get something together, the changelog from the leaked 5.8 build 3660 beta to the 5.9 Final release leaves a lot to desire, considering the fact that WACUP, an independent project at providing a Winamp-like experience and keeping compatibility with plugins up to Winamp 5.666, accomplished much more in the time the Winamp team were working on 5.9 (at least when comparing the changes between WACUP 1.0.21.7236 (11 March 2021) to WACUP 1.9.19.16956 (23 September 2023), which is a little over 4 years).
They jumped directly to 5.9 Final which fixed a lot of the issues reported and it looked like things were improving...
As is the trend with stuffing things with AI these days, Llama Group just couldn't stop themselves from adding some form of "NFT" support... which really just means adding a useless node in the Media Library that opens a webpage in your default browser and getting a "M3U NFT playlist" that contains the mp3's stored in some server...
Despite the backlash, it was kept in the final release of 5.9.1 and that would be the end of that. Unfortunately due to a forum update, looking more into the individual RCs of 5.9.1 makes it a bit difficult, as either the links are broken or don't lead to the correct place, I might revisit this later.
This is the end of Winamp as we know it now, with the final stable release of 5.9.2, there hasn't been anything released or developed since.
It is presumed that after the release of this version, the development team was let go, including DJ Egg, marking the final and official death of Winamp and the Llama.
No updates are to be expected, and the codebase will now collect dust.
...
...
...
Because as it turns out, they weren't done quite yet!
Sometime in May (press release has been deleted) they proudly announced that they would "opening up its source code to enable collaborative development of its legendary player for Windows", which everyone understood as "Winamp goes Open Source", which was a flat out lie and worded in this way just to entice people to get interested in their shenanigans once again, but would they really hold up their promise?
They did, but fucked up majorly in the process.
Rumor once again has it that this was a last minute job of cobbling together everything they had and weren't supposed to have, like code from Dolby or the SHOUTcast DNAS source code.
According to DrO, who was once a former Winamp developer and worked with them up until ~2014 (or later, I can't fully remember), he's made sure that the code package they would receive was free from the proprietary stuff from Fraunhofer, Dolby and more, but it found its way in their hands anyway, and everyone got to see what they still had.
No one took this seriously, the license forbade anyone to create forks of the codebase and it was all presented as "work for us for free". They made the license a bit more "lax" but clearly still made it clear that there should be no distributions made from it.
They lasted a few weeks before deleting the repository off of Github, maybe due to the insane amount of spam, maybe due to the amount of code they shouldn't have had in the first place, who knows.
And that really was the end of it....... hopefully.
It's been weirdly silent ever since the GitHub repository went down, it's possible that they have given up on the brand entirely, they haven't really done or said much of anything in the public space about Classic 'Winamp' or their Spotify clone of the same name, the iOS app is kept somewhat regularly up to date, but other than that, there's been nothing.
They lit up in the news once as they (Llama Group) claimed that NVIDIA and Suno were using music they owned on Jamendo in NVIDIA and Suno's AI datasets.
According to a press release (that no one noticed), no agreement was reached with NVIDIA, and Suno didn't respond entirely.
This would be the only time where I agree with Llama Group and hope that something positive comes out of this, but it's entirely unlikely.
The only notable thing that's "interesting" is they've been getting into debt more and more, changing names, buying themselves from subsidiaries or whatever they did, other than that, it's been radio silent.