AOL to Buy Spinner.com

from the more-acquisitions dept

Tue, Jun 1st 1999 11:20am — Mike Masnick

According to sources at the Industry Standard, AOL is about to buy Spinner.com. Not really a big surprise there, as Spinner was pretty much sitting around waiting to get bought. Update: Okay, this is rumor no longer. It is confirmed. Added to the deal, however, making it an even bigger surprise is Nullsoft, the fun folks who make WinAmp and shoutcast. Shoutcast as an AOL property is big news. Probably scary news, too.

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Mark Baker, 1 Jun 1999 @ 7:00pm

Not so scary
I figure this is just a move against MS who've been pushing their new codec. If you ask me, this is good news for the MP3 scene.

Could a AOL/mp3.com deal be far off?
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- Mike (profile), 1 Jun 1999 @ 10:41pm
  
  Re: Not so scary
  Maybe you have a more benevolent view of AOL than I do. What struck me as interesting about Nullsoft was I always believed they were doing what they did for the good of the consumer. I'm not so sure about AOL. I understand how it brings a bigger player into the mp3 camp (maybe), but I'm not sure they needed the bigger player. Either way, should be interesting to see what comes next. Most interesting comment on this that I saw was that AOL now owns 3 of the four top downloaded programs on download.com (ICQ, Netscape, WinAmp). All that's left: WinZip.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]