Winamp, the program many people used for over a decade to listen to their favorite tunes, is going to shut down next month. Since its beginning, the small music-playing app - or software, as we used to call it when Winamp first appeared - has faced increasing competition and domination from Apple, Microsoft, and others, especially after the mobile music revolution began a few years into Winamp's life.

Reports of Winamp's demise came quietly, as the announcement was simply posted as a notification at the top of AOL's appropriately retro Winamp website:

"Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release."

At the bottom of the short notice, a hint of poignancy: "Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years."

Winamp was acquired by AOL in 1999 during the dot-com bubble, after the highly customizable, theme skin-applicable music player became the music nerd's preferred system to sort and play their MP3 music libraries - at least on Windows PCs. The program, which promised that it "really whips the llamas's ass" was one of the first full-function music program that allowed for making playlists and creating custom equalizer settings, all while being a tiny few-megabytes large and incredibly efficient.

The little application, whose name originally stood for "Windows Advanced Multimedia Products" hit the early internet in 1997, after which the makers officially became Nullsoft. According to Ars Technica's extensive feature in 2012, tracing the rise and fall of Winamp, the company originally allowed a download of Winamp for $10 shareware. But Nullsoft didn't lock any of the features of the program down, so the $10 shareware was closer to a donation.

Despite that low, voluntary entry cost, customers were paying enough to bring in lots of money: "In that year before we were acquired [1998], we were bringing in $100,000 a month form $10 checks - paper checks in the mail!" said Winamp's first general manager Rob Lord to Ars.

AOL's acquisition of Winamp came right before a veritable storm: first the internet stock bubble burst, followed by a fraught and eventually failed merger with Time Warner, followed by the boom in mobile music - first brought on by the iPod, and followed by the rise of smartphones and ubiquitous wireless internet, with all the mobile music options beyond Mp3s available from that.

Throughout that period, the general consensus is that AOL mismanaged Winamp, and though the company released an Android and Mac version of Winamp to try to keep in step with the times, Winamp has gone from cult to esoteric. AOL so far hasn't commented on the demise of Winamp, beyond the notification posted on the website.

However, since AOL has posted the notification, TechCrunch has learned that the company is in talks with Microsoft. So there's a possibility that Winamp may survive with Microsoft, though that is by no means a sure thing. The next thing AOL is reportedly planning on shutting down is Shoutcast.