Winamp will resell Deezer's catalog to the 40 million people still running its player

The existing Winamp plays files off a local disk, and the company says 40 million people worldwide still use it ^[11]. The relaunch asks some share of them to start paying every month for a catalog Winamp does not own, in a second app sitting beside the free one on the same download page ^[2][4].

Deezer supplies the streaming technology and the music catalog; Winamp supplies the name ^[2]. Winamp keeps everything the user sees. Interface customization stays, and the company says it will add social features plus ways to pull internet radio, podcasts and a personal cloud collection into the same player as a local library ^[3][5]. Winamp says it hopes the move will reinvent and reinvigorate the brand ^[1]. Deezer gets a new channel into a business line that is shrinking: the partnership subscribers Winamp will join fell 20% year over year, to 3.1 million ^[8]. Partnerships are about 35% of Deezer's remaining subscribers ^[21].

A 20% fall to 3.1 million implies about 3.9 million a year earlier, so roughly 775,000 partner subscribers went missing ^[18]. Convert 1% of Winamp's 40 million and Deezer books 400,000, a little over half of what it lost ^[19]. Winamp did not say what it will charge ^[6]. The 40 million counts people using the player, and the company says only that it hopes a notable percentage will try the service ^[11].

Deezer holds 1.3% of global music streaming subscribers and Spotify more than 31% ^[9]. Those percentages do not sit on the same base as the subscriber counts: 8.9 million at 1.3% implies a market of about 685 million, while Spotify's more than 300 million premium subscribers at 31% implies about 968 million ^[20]. Spotify reported net income of 545 million euros for the second quarter of 2026 ^[10].

Renting a catalog means renting its contents. Deezer demonetizes 85% of the AI-generated tracks it receives and keeps them out of recommendations ^[13]. Those calls stay with Deezer. Complaints about them will arrive under the Winamp name.

This is the second time Winamp has promised this. In 2018 it said a completely new version would arrive the following year with podcasts, streaming radio stations and cloud-based music, and nothing substantive came of it, partly because of the streaming economics of the time ^[14]. "People want one single experience," Alexandre Saboundjian, then chief executive of Radionomy, which owned Winamp and is now called Winamp Group, told TechCrunch ^[15]. In 2023 he told Fast Company: "The streaming platform is already a field with a lot of competition, and all these companies were not really in a healthy situation when we talk about finance." ^[16]

Whether a licensed catalog under an old brand works depends on how many of the brand's current users already pay for something like the product being resold; Winamp's users run a file player, and the 2018 attempt collapsed before anyone found out. It also depends on which company owns the fix when a track vanishes or a playlist breaks, because the brand owns the support thread and the licensor owns the system. Saboundjian said in a statement, "Twenty-five years ago we changed the way people listened to digital music, and we believe the time has come to challenge the listening experience once again." ^[17]