You're underestimating Winamp and related own-your-music music players. I have real-world usage data on quite a lot of music players and websites, here's the top 30. The number is how many songs played in total on that website (I run something similar to last.fm scrobbling)
This data is from the past 5 years or so, not sure to be honest.
1 YouTube 14,244,087
2 Spotify desktop 2,751,012
3 Monstercat 1,171,321
4 Pandora 895,765
5 VLC media player 892,006
6 iTunes 854,311
7 SoundCloud 724,019
8 YouTube Music 640,801
9 Deezer 501,474
10 Winamp 289,216
11 Foobar2000 251,726
12 Vk.com music 134,319
13 Aimp3 123,306
14 Musicbee 113,652
15 Google play music 89,827
16 Epidemicsound 87,573
17 Spotify web player 81,590
18 Media monkey 70,611
19 Amazon Music 55,691
20 Clementine 29,750
21 Tunein radio 24,413
22 Google play music desktop (community) 22,910
23 Media Player Classic Home Cinema 15,654
24 Pot player 11,348
25 Plug.dj 8,144
26 Tidal web player 7,770
27 Jriver media center 5,200
28 Digitally Imported di.fm 4,636
29 SiriusXM 2,397
30 Dubtrack.fm 1,031
Pleasantly surprised to see Clementine in the list (though a bit disappointed with how low it is in the list).
Great app, and I used it a lot because it had seamless last.fm scrobbling (Man, those were the days!). I was one of the early users of it back a decade ago, and funnily found out about the "clementine" fruit after googling why my music player has an "orange slice" as it's icon. :D
I tend to add whatever users request. There have been music players in the past that were requested but I was never able to add support for.
The most notable request is... windows media player! I still don't know how to get real-time 'now playing' data from WMP! I'd imagine WMP being very high up on this list as well otherwise.
Two others are the Amazon desktop app and the pandora fm desktop.
I'd imagine my application could theoretically be used to scrobble to last.fm too for alllll music players you have on your desktop, but it'd be a bit of development work to add that
There are many people coming from WMP asking me what music player they should use, my most common recommendations are Foobar2000, AIMP3 and clementine, by the way! There's a lot of really great music software out there that's just being ignored by the mainstream.
It was kind of surprising to me though that YouTube (not even YouTube music, mind you) is the most popular "music player", although relating it to my own experience this makes a lot of sense. It's not even a real music player, playlist randomisation is broken, and there's a whole lot of other stuff missing and broken when it comes to playing music (no seamless transitions, ads, GEMA/DMCA/whatever based on your location, uploads removing videos etc)
Accessibility is by far the most important thing here. Even Spotify doesn't even come close despite being second place
Except perhaps in the audio quality department... I don't know how much things have changed, but I recall youtube doing a bit of compression on the imported audio.
Opt-in does not mean the data is inaccurate. It could be wildly off, but most likely it is in the ballpark, and there is a chance it's completely indicative of the relative usages by various platforms.
If you can provide better data or evidence where this is incorrect that help.
It's accurate about tech-savvy people that listen to a lot of music. It's not accurate about music listening by all users everywhere. I'd wager most people use streaming platforms nowadays over downloading music locally.
Absolutely! You can still run older version of Musicbee under WINE and it works without much issues. Now a days I use Guayadeque player and quite happy with it.
monstercat.com has a music player, that's where the count comes from.
My software is meant for twitch streamers, and monstercat is especially well-suited for streamers due to how they license their music to be safe for streaming under the DMCA.
If you kind of familiar with linux its really not hard and works kind of of the box.
But it is really mighty and still simple. A very large number of (good) clients for every platform due to its simple protocol. I really like the client-server approach.
Very recently I used an icecast [1] output (mpd can have multiple audio outputs you can switch or use parallel on demand) on my headless server to automatically cast the stream to the inbuild chromecast of my onkyo receiver to listen to audiobooks.
Homeassistant uses its own MPD integration to check the state is changing (play/stop), when it changes to play it sends the shoutcast url to the chromecast.
Also stuff like this on the terminal makes me happy:
# mpc search artist moloko | grep -i doctor | shuf | mpc add
This data is from the past 5 years or so, not sure to be honest.