It seems the latest version of Winamp, released earlier on Wednesday, will be the last. The media player software has announced that it is going to go dark to the Internet community sometime next month.

"Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013," the notice on the Winamp website reads. "Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download."

According to The Register, Winamp was first launched back in 1997 by Justin Frankel and his company Nullsoft. It quickly became one of the most popular media players for all Windows computers. AOL acquired Nullsoft two years later and has retained ownership of the company as a subsidiary ever since.

Since that time, Nullsoft has come up with several software product innovations including a sofrware installation system, a streaming media format, the Gnutella file sharing system and the WASTE peer-to-peer messaging and IM platform. However, despite all the innovation, Winamp remained the company's most basic mainstay and has recently worked to release ports to Android and OS X as well as support for Windows 8.

Despite its success, Winamp simply cannot compete with the rise of streaming media services like Pandora, Spotify and Apple Radio. In addition, every OS platform has come with a built-in media player for quite some time now (two decades cited by The Register). It seems that Nullsoft and Winamp simply cannot compete as a third party standalone media player anymore now that those services have all but completely fallen out of favor.

So far the company has not given a reason for the shut down.

As of now it isn't clear if third-party download sites will be able to carry a Windamp download following the official site's closure on Dec. 20. However, given that Winamp is a copyrighted property, it seems unlikely that anyone will be able to offer it after its shutdown.

UPDATE: This article originally had the wrong date for when Winamp was going offline. It has since been corrected.