FEATURE:
Innovation, Colour and Form
PHOTO CREDIT: mymind
Forty-Five Years of Sony’s Walkman and Forty Years of the Discman – and Why We Need Modern Updates
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THIS year is quite a big one…
ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Ricard Jorge
when it comes to anniversaries of important music technology. I want to talk about Sony and them launching the Walkman and Discman. The Discman was launched in November 1984. We will mark forty years of its release later in the year. Even though some deride its lack of stability and the fact CDs would skip, it was a revolutionary and important breakthrough. The Walkman arrived on 1st July, 1979. It turns forty-five in the summer. It should be celebrated and compel makers to come up with a modern version. I know there are modern equivalents of the Discman, though there are few modern-day portable cassette players. Even the modern technology that is on the market lacks the personality, coolness and colour of Sony’s products. The photo I have included at the top was taken from Twitter. Someone discussing how cool Sony’s technology is in terms of the design and look. Before thinking about why we need a modern-day equivalent, I want to bring in some articles about the iconic Sony Walkman. The Design Museum give us some history about a device that, in 1979, allowed people access to music on the go:
“An Accidental Success
The Walkman was first created because Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka wanted to be able to listen to music on long flights. The first model of Sony Walkman, the TPS-L2, was released in 1979, and it proved to be a huge hit.
Small and Sturdy
The original Walkman was created from aluminium, and the later models were made from plastic. Amazingly, the Walkman wasn't much bigger than the cassette tape itself! And it wasn't just the player that was tiny. Before the Walkman, there hadn't been any need for headphones that you could wear whilst you were walking; they were all designed to be worn whilst stationary. Headphones made before the Walkman were very heavy, but Sony managed to produce a lightweight set that weighed just 45 grams.
A bit too nifty?
The inventor of the Walkman thought people would want to listen to music together, so he put two headphone jacks on the player (remember that the headphones went over your head instead of the earphones most of us use today, where you can share one pair between two people). The Walkman TPS-L2 also had a HOT LINE button, which when pressed, muted the music on the Walkman and turned on an inbuilt microphone. This meant you could talk to someone without having to take your headphones off. Both of these features were later removed from the Walkman because people didn't use them. This is important as it shows a change in what was considered the norm. Previously, walking around with headphones would have been seen as rude and antisocial, but it soon became accepted behaviour.
Paving the Way to Bigger and Better
The Sony Walkman cassette player revolutionised the way that we listen to music. It enabled people to create soundtracks to their lives in ways that hadn't been possible before. The fact that you could use your Walkman anywhere changed that; music had never been so personal.
It was the first in a long line of portable audio players, and without it, we might not have the same objects such as iPods and MP3 players that we do today”.
I do think that there is a lack of consideration for portable devices today. At a time when physical formats like CDs and cassettes are coming back and demanded, there is not this sense of supply and urgency from manufacturers. In 2024, in a year when we mark at least two big Sony anniversaries, why is there not more of an effort to create something iconic for the modern consumer?! A range of portable devices for cassettes and CDs that would not price people out. As they are not revolutionary and new anymore, you can afford to charge between £50-£100 for a modern Walkman or Discman. The New Yorker discussed the significance of the Sony Walkman in a feature from 2020. Over forty years after it came out, I don’t think we have seen anything as groundbreaking in terms of music-playing devices:
“The Walkman instantly entrenched itself in daily life as a convenient personal music-delivery device; within a few years of its global launch, it emerged as a status symbol and fashion statement in and of itself. “We just got back from Paris and everybody’s wearing them,” Andy Warhol enthused to the Post. Boutiques like Bloomingdale’s had months-long waiting lists of eager customers. Paul Simon ostentatiously wore his onstage at the 1981 Grammys; by Christmas, they were de-rigueur celebrity gifts, with leading lights like Donna Summer dispensing them by the dozens. There had been popular electronic gadgets before, such as the pocket-sized transistor radios of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. But the Walkman was in another league. Until this point, earphones had been associated with hearing impairment, geeky technicians manning sonar stations, or basement-dwelling hi-fi fanatics. Somehow, a Japanese company had made the high-tech headgear cool.
Steve Jobs, then the young C.E.O. of a fledgling Silicon Valley startup called Apple Computer, had personally received a Walkman from Morita on a business trip to Japan, where Jobs went in search of disk-drive suppliers in the early nineteen-eighties. When Jobs returned home, he didn’t even bother listening to a cassette on the Walkman; instead, he opened and dissected the machinery piece by piece, reading tiny gears, drive belts, and capstans like tea leaves, to divine how he might, someday, make something so epically world-changing himself. “Steve’s point of reference was Sony at the time,” his successor at Apple, John Sculley, recalled. “He really wanted to be Sony. He didn’t want to be IBM. He didn’t want to be Microsoft. He wanted to be Sony.”
Jobs would get his wish with the début of the iPod, in 2001. It wasn’t the first digital-music player—a South Korean firm had introduced one back in 1998. (That Sony failed to exploit the niche, in spite of having created listening-on-the-go and even owning its own record label, was a testament to how Morita’s unexpected retirement after a stroke, in 1993, hobbled the corporation.) But Apple’s was the most stylish to date, bereft of the complicated and button-festooned interfaces of its competitors, finished in sleek pearlescent plastic and with a satisfying heft that hinted at powerful technologies churning inside. Apple also introduced a tantalizing new method of serving up music: the shuffle, which let listeners remix entire musical libraries into never-ending audio backdrops for their lives. Once again, city streets were the proving ground for this evolution of portable listening technology. “I was on Madison [Ave],” Jobs told Newsweek, in 2004, “and it was, like, on every block, there was someone with white headphones, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, it’s starting to happen.’ ”
That happening never really stopped, even after the advent, in 2007, of the iPhone—a direct descendant of the iPod and Walkman—made stand-alone portable music players obsolete. The iPhone added the intraocular drip of always accessible Internet, a new way of escaping the cacophonies that surround us. But the headphones were here to stay. iPod sales have dwindled to the point that Apple stopped reporting them in 2014, but, that very same year, the company purchased the headphones company Beats by Dre for more than three billion dollars. At the time, this marked the single biggest acquisition in Apple’s history—proof of Sony’s prescience in discovering and stoking an incandescent hunger for auditory escapes in our daily lives. The Walkman wasn’t the end of meeting people, but it paved the way for surviving an unthinkable era in which we would find ourselves unable to meet at all”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Retrospekt
Most modern-day music-playing devices from Sony are functional and sleek rather than interesting. They rely more on digital music rather than the physical. As the physical market is growing, the selection of players we have out there are probably not enough. Very few are particularly interesting. By introducing a range of contemporary Walkman and Discmans in a range of colours and designs, it would definitely appeal to people now. Not just a younger demographic. For people like me who had a Discman and a Walkman when I was a child, it would be great to own something to play CDs and cassettes on. It is clear that Sony particularly had an eye for appealing designs. Even if some of the devices were not durable and had their faults, they were definitely innovative and convenient. I recall having a Walkman for a very long time. My Discman had its moments, yet I owned it for years and got a great deal of value from it. This year marks forty-five years of the Walkman. It is also forty years since the Discman was released. Even if the oriignal versions were a little bland, through the years, Sony evolved in a sense. More eye-catching and attractive, they did not skimp on functionality and durability. Always with one eye on the look and the other with endurance. When we are seeing CD and cassette sales rise, why are we not seeing new models come out?! I guess some would say there is not enough demand. I would argue against this. If the price was reasonable and we could keep CD and cassette prices reasonable, it would mean a lot more people bought them and devices on which to play them. I hope that one day soon we see a company realise that the Discman and Walkman should not be…
ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Society6
CONFINED to the past.