How walkman changed the music scene?
We all are familiar with the iPod’s fame as the most popular portable music device in the 21st Century, but did you know it was the Walkman that introduced and popularized portable music?
The ’80s was one of the most significant decades for music. It was the time when digital downloads and YouTube weren’t around. People relied on Walkman and Stereo to listen to music. The Walkman took on different shapes throughout the 90s and 2000 before being overthrown by digital music and digital music devices like iPod and smartphones.
Much of today’s nostalgia music is based on the “Walkman generation,” and it’s well carried out by popular web series like Stranger Things and Hollywood blockbuster “Guardians of the Galaxy.”
If you recall the first scene from Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), where the Star-Lord/Peter Quill walks into Morag, he turns on “Come and Get Your Love” by Redbone on his Sony TPS-L2 Walkman. The very Walkman came out in 1979, so yeah, Peter Quill owned one of the first Walkmans ever made.
The 80s was the age of classic hits such as Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean and Lionel Richie’s Say You Say Me, popularized by Walkman’s massive use.
The first Walkman came out in 1979, a year after analog cassettes were first introduced. Thanks to Sony’s Walkman, the concept of portable music spread worldwide in a short time. The Americans called Walkman it a “Soundabout,” while Europeans called it “Stowaway” and “Freestyle.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abGdOkHSpec
The portable device didn’t only play music but also recorded sound. Every device came with two headphone jacks, volume rockers, and an inbuilt Microphone with an ON/OFF Switch.
Let’s take a short ride through the history of portable music.
The History of Sony Walkman
SONY introduced its first Walkman portable cassette player precisely 41 years ago, kicking off a music revolution worldwide. It was first introduced in 1979 by Sony Corporation. Nobutoshi Kihara was an engineer at Sony who made the first Walkman cassette-tape player in the 1970s. He was commonly referred to as “Mr. Walkman” in the press.
When the first Walkman came out, it cost a whopping $150. The price gradually came down when it became a commercial hit. Many youngsters and low-wage workers could buy their own set, which helped popularize the Walkman throughout the world.
The Walkman is synonymous with the 1980s. If you grew up in that era, you’d remember buying new cassettes or borrowing used cassettes of Michael Jackson, Lionel Ritchie, and Guns n’ Roses to listen to every day.
Many wonder how Sony Walkman was able to change how we listen to music. Well, Sony successfully managed to combine the personal and portable packages into one. The ubiquitous device was easy to carry around and listen to whenever you wanted. Unlike previous music devices, you could own a Walkman and carry it with you everywhere.
The introduction of Pop Music in the 80s, readily available cassettes, and the unveiling of MTV Music Channel made Sony Walkman a household item. It lured many youngsters into getting their music device.
According to theVerge.com,
“Over 400 million Walkman portable music players have been sold so far, and 200 million of them cassette players.”
The number may seem less, but you should remember that it was before the whole internet and digital music scene came into the scene. A few years after, the world was getting used to listening to music on a portable device.
The Walkman would go on to see numerous hardware iterations over the years, including “Discman” CD models and MiniDisc players, as well as more modern portable media player devices that Sony still sells today.
Sony retired the classic cassette tape Walkman in 2010 as it wasn’t viable to sell these devices in lieu of new digital gadgets.
Vintage Sony TPS-L2 Cassette Walkman
If you remember the iconic Peter Quill’s entry scene from The Guardians of the Galaxy, you’d see him brandishing one of the first Walkman units ever made.
Did you know the first Guardian of the Galaxy movie used the original Sony TPS-L2 Walkman from 1979? The later films used a replica because a massive fire at Sony’s warehouses eliminated many copies of the original Walkman that Quill had used in Guardians of the Galaxy.
The props team from the movie scavenged through eBay to buy an original Sony Walkman. They found a few for a whopping price of $8,000. But looking at how much money the first movie minted, paying $8,000 doesn’t seem a lot.
The metal-cased blue-and-silver Walkman TPS-L2, the world’s first low-cost personal stereo, sold more than 30,000 units in the first two months of its introduction. You can still find many vintage Sony Walkman and Sony’s DD range of cassettes going for almost $1,699 on eBay.
The original Walkman was created from aluminum, and the later models were made from plastic. Headphones made before the Walkman were cumbersome, but Sony managed to produce a lightweight set that weighed 45 grams. Thanks to Sony’s introduction of cheaper headphones, we’re able to use them even today.
Each Walkman was powered by two AA batteries that would last almost 12 hours.
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As the name suggests, the term “Walkman” caught on because people could use it even while walking. It made people walk more.
According to a Time article, the number of people who said they walked for exercise increased by 30% during the height of the Walkman’s popularity during the late80s-early ’90s. So it successfully lived up to its name.
How Walkman made way for iPod?
The last Walkman from Sony, WM-FX290 Walkman, was initially released in 2004. After a mild refresh in 2008, it remained the only Walkman sold by Sony in the U.S. for the next two years until Sony finally stopped producing any more Walkman.
With the turn of the 21st Century, Sony Walkman started gradually vanishing from most households. People started switching to more portable and digital options such as iPod, laptop, and smartphone because they were more accessible. This stage marked the beginning of the end of Walkman.
With the increase in internet bandwidth, it became easy to upload and download music from different websites. People started downloading music on their computer or laptop, and they needed a music device that could store their endless list of songs. iPod gave them this exact solution. People could upload music to their iPods and carry it along with them. When they got bored with their list, they could easily update it with iTunes, a computer app.
This significantly reduced the usage of cassettes and CDs to record music. Although Compact Disks are still in use, cassettes have entirely vanished from the music scene. With the introduction of the iPod, the sale of Sony Walkman and other portable music devices completely went down.
Sony’s first Walkman to accept digital files, the NW-MS7, was introduced in Japan in December 2000 and went on sale elsewhere the following year.
Apple Inc. launched the first iPod in 2001, and it went for a whopping price of $399, but because people were able to access its 5GB hard drive capable of storing 1,000 songs, it didn’t seem to be an expensive device.
Today, people have access to smartphones that can store over 10,000 songs. With the advent of cloud storage, you need not store songs on your smartphone anymore. You can easily download millions of songs from any part of the world using cloud storage and a high-bandwidth internet.
As of 2020, only digital audio and media players are currently in production by Sony Corporation. Other Walkman producers pulled out from the market almost at the same time Sony stopped producing new Walkman. The analog cassettes used in Walkman are mostly out of use today, with only a handful of private users still using cassettes with an older Walkman and Cassette player model.
You could still get to see people using Walkman but only in movies and series based around the period between the 80s and 90s.
