Exactly 40 years ago, on July 1, 1979, the Walkman was marketed for the first time in Japan, an instrument that revolutionized the way music is listened to, and without which today we probably wouldn't be walking around with a pair of earphones in the ears while listening to songs. It was produced by the Japanese electronics company Sony, which in the following years dominated the market for portable cassette players thanks to this invention.
Cassettes were patented in 1963 by the Dutch company Philips, and have since become one of the most popular tools for listening to music outside the home. Unlike vinyl records, which were considered better quality but bulkier, cassettes were small and handy, perfect for listening to the car stereo system. In the seventies, some portable cassette players also became popular, but they were mainly used for work. They did not play in stereo sound and were still quite heavy, better suited to being placed on a table during a meeting than held in the hand while walking, and could record or play a cassette (generally microcassettes, a format used primarily in answering machines and tape recorders). vocals, but not for recording music). Sony called them “Pressman”, because they were designed primarily for journalists who needed to record interviews.
In 1978 Sony produced a model that was the basis of the Walkman, the TC-D5. It was battery powered only and could play cassette tapes with great sound quality, but it was very expensive (around $ 1,000) and was still quite bulky. Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka, who is said to have liked to use it to listen to music on his business plane trips, was a big user. Ibuka, however, found it too big, and therefore asked the department that dealt with the production of recorders, led by Kozo Ohsone, to develop a lighter model for him, from which the possibility of recording was eliminated and that he could reproduce music also in stereo. Modeled on the version of the TC-D5 made for Ibuka, Akio Morita, the other founder of Sony, asked to develop an even smaller cassette player that would be accessible to as many people as possible, in order to market it in time for the holidays. summer of 1979.
Ohsone and the Sony engineers set to work to build it quickly and used the TC-D5 as a base, but to lower the price they decided to use lower quality materials. Thus was born the TPS-L2, a compact object weighing about 400 grams powered by two AA batteries, which was called Walkman. The first model was metallic blue, a color chosen by Sony because it recalled that of blue jeans. It did not have a loudspeaker, and to play a cassette tape it was necessary to use a pair of headphones connected via an audio jack.
Initially, the Walkman should have included a pair of large headphones, the kind that cover the entire ear cup: only they would have been much larger than the Walkman itself, making it unnecessary to try to make that instrument something to carry around every day with. self. The Walkman was then sold with a lighter pair of headphones, which Sony had begun developing three years earlier, which had tiny earbuds covered in foam pads. The first model did not allow you to make recordings, but gave the possibility to use two headphones at the same time and had a “Hotline” button that allowed two people to talk to each other through the microphone of the Walkman even while there was music playing. The feature was removed in later models.
It was Oshone who proposed calling it Walkman, on the cast of the old Pressman, because it gave the idea of an object to use while walking (it can be translated as “person who walks”, from the English walk, “to walk”, and man, “person”). However, not everyone at Sony was convinced of this choice, also because it could seem a Japanese distortion of what would be the correct wording in English (walking man). Someone speculated to call him Walky, but in the end Morita decided to support the choice of Oshone, also because by now the name Walkman had already been printed on the packaging and on advertising posters and there was no more time to change it.
The Walkman was put on sale in Japan on July 1st at a price of 39 thousand yen (around 130 euros at the time, which today would be around 4-500 euros, taking into account inflation) and 30 thousand units were initially produced. The presentation to journalists took place a few days earlier, on June 22, but not with a classic press conference. The reporters were taken by bus to Tokyo's Yoyogi-kōen park, and each was given a Walkman with a tape on which the product description was recorded. The recording also included some actions that the reporters had to do, and some actors giving demonstrations of the use of the Walkman.
(The first TV commercials for the Walkman in Japan)
Sony decided not to invest in large television advertising campaigns, but to focus on more innovative initiatives that would make the Walkman popular with young people. He hired some guys to wander the crowded streets of Shinjuku and Ginza in Tokyo, stopping passersby to let them hear the potential of the Walkman. In the first month only 3,000 units were sold but by the end of August all Walkmans were sold out.
In the following months, the success of the Walkman in Japan was unstoppable, and Sony prepared to launch it in Europe and North America as well. At first it was thought to market it overseas under a different name (Soundabout in the US, Stowaway in the UK and Freestyle in Sweden). Morita, however, is told on the Sony website, was convinced to keep the original name after a trip to Europe in which he realized that several people who had been on vacation in Japan had bought a Walkman, making the product popular also in other countries. Furthermore, the name was easy to remember and to pronounce even in countries that are not native English speakers, thus amplifying its diffusion.
In a short time the Walkman became very popular all over the world, and already in 1980 made its appearance in the cinema in the French film by Claude Pinoteau The Time of Apples (whose original title was La Boum), in a scene that became iconic. During a party, the character of Mathieu (played by Alexandre Sterling) makes Vic (Sophie Marceau) wear a pair of headphones from a Walkman to make her listen to a slow (Reality by Richard Sanderson) while everyone around their friends dance to a song. dance.
The popularity of the Walkman in the 1980s was such – in the meantime many companies began producing their own versions – that in 1986 the word was also included in the Oxford English Dictionary, the leading dictionary of the English language. Its success was due to multiple factors, not least a new focus in the Western world for exercise and jogging in particular. With the Walkman, for the first time it was possible to do something that today seems completely natural to us, but which at the time was not: go for a run listening to music.
The spread of cassette tapes over the years gradually declined, in favor of formats with better sound, such as CDs, and Sony decided to give the name Walkman to devices capable of playing CDs and MiniDiscs as well. However, it came late in the creation of an MP3 player: while in fact in 2001 Apple introduced the iPod, Sony preferred to focus on music players in ATRAC format, which quickly proved to be a failure. In the meantime, Sony also continued to sell Walkmans to play cassette tapes: production was permanently discontinued on October 23, 2010.
Today Sony no longer produces cassette players, and the prices of the original ones on eBay can be as high as several hundred euros. Although the Walkman is no longer in production, in recent years the sales of cassette tapes have returned to growth after years of silence. Thanks to some famous artists such as Taylor Swift, Jay-Z and Lana Del Rey, who have also put their latest records on sale in cassette for collectors and lovers of vintage things, in 2018 in the United States 219 thousand cassettes were sold, 23 percent more than in 2017. In 2014, the Walkman was also seen again in the cinema, in the 2014 film The Guardians of the Galaxy, where Star-Lord (played by Chris Pratt) uses it in the opening scene to listen Come and Get Your Love by Redbone.
