In what feels like an early social media and art phenomena, everyone had their Winamp styled in their own special way.Ī scroll through the Winamp Skin Museum is a shot of nostalgia and a kind of archeological dig for early clues of the ever-evolving internet aesthetic. Winamp allowed you to customize and share the player interface. Ask anyone who was around the internet at the time and the first thing that will pop to mind is the skins. Before that, you were stuck with either Windows Media Player or RealPlayer, neither of which worked all that well.Īs Ars Technica explains, “none of those players could, in the mid-1990s, do something as basic as playlists, much less visualizations, and custom skins, nor were they as tightly and efficiently programmed as Winamp.” And there it is. The music player was initially released in 1997 and acquired by AOL for nearly $100 million in 1999. But before iTunes, there was one choice for all your MP3 needs: Winamp. IPods were a big destination for much of that downloaded music.

Of course, you could buy music on iTunes, but the tides didn’t really start to turn to paying for music until streaming services like Spotify combined with the power of the new wave of smartphones that emerged with the arrival of the iPhone in 2008. After that, the next wave of P2P music services was led by names LimeWire, Morpheus, and BearShare. Napster was born in 1999 and was effectively gone by the end of 2001. Think back to the early-2000s internet and music is sure to play a big role in your memories.

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