Winamp to Return in 2027 With Deezer-Powered Subscription Service

The new offering will combine the subscription with local files, Internet radio, podcasts and cloud-stored music libraries. Winamp says the original desktop app still has more than 40 million active users worldwide, and the same Deezer-powered subscription will be added to that app after launch. Pricing and supported platforms have not been disclosed. Winamp has promised a subscription model that is “fundamentally different” from today’s streaming services. The press release also commits to a customizable interface, social features and new tools for discovering and organizing music, with more product previews promised in the coming months.

Deezer signed the Winamp deal on July 1, weeks before the official announcement, and presented it to investors as part of its revamped Deezer for Business program. Under the white-label arrangement, Deezer will run the streaming infrastructure and supply the catalog, while Winamp retains full ownership of the core product, its branding and its subscriber relationship. The companies frame the deal as mutually beneficial: Winamp has no music licenses and no streaming infrastructure, while Deezer gains the biggest brand yet to plug into its white-label program.

Deezer reported a decline in new subscriptions from partner deals in its first-half 2026 financial results. Those subscriptions fell to 3.1 million, down about 800,000 year over year, while revenue from the partnerships segment dropped 7.6 percent to 70.7 million euros as a bundling deal with Latin American retail giant Mercado Libre wound down. Deezer told investors in April that rebuilding this side of the business through white-label deals is a stated strategic priority, with recent segments covering Telenor and French energy supplier EDF.

Winamp has promised a revival before. Alexandre Saboundjian, now CEO of Winamp Group and then CEO of the company that owned Winamp, told TechCrunch in October 2018 that a completely new Winamp would launch the following year. He promised a more complete listening experience spanning home, MP3s, cloud libraries, podcasts and streaming radio stations. That streaming-friendly revival planned for 2019 never came. The plan depended on pulling third-party streaming services into a single app, an approach that would have required integration deals Winamp never announced. The 2027 Deezer partnership sidesteps that problem by bundling Winamp’s service with Deezer’s licensing and streaming infrastructure on day one.

A refreshed version of the player did appear in 2022. Winamp published the classic player’s source code on GitHub in September 2024 under a custom license that initially barred anyone from distributing forks. The entire repository was deleted a few weeks later, after the license attracted sustained criticism and proprietary code belonging to Dolby and Microsoft was found.

For the first time in its nearly 30-year history, Winamp will offer a premium subscription. If the Deezer partnership proves successful, it would mark a rebound for a service that AOL had planned to shut down in 2013 before selling it to Radionomy.