[lmm]

> I remember one version was fantastic, and then the next version sucked. I'm pretty sure this was due to a change in ownership or something

Winamp 3 was a major regression that sparked a backlash (in particular it had a new skin engine that probably was a priori better, but broke compatibility all existing skins, which wasn't popular; also performance, which had been a major selling point, was worse), but I don't remember there being any change of ownership or monetization effort. I think it was just a genuine well-intentioned rewrite that ended up worse than the original, like Netscape 4 or KDE4.