FEATURE:
A Portable Revolution
IMAGE CREDIT: Richard Jorge
Looking Ahead to Forty-Five Years of the Sony Walkman
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I would advise people to read…
PHOTO CREDIT: Stefan/Pexels
articles like this that provide facts about the iconic Sony Walkman. It was released in Japan on 1st July, 1979. I wanted to mark its forty-fifth anniversary. There are those who will say that it seems outdated in the modern age. Even though it went through evolution and was fairly cumbersome and expensive at first, it was refined and more accessible as the years progressed. So many different models and variations were released. In 1979, and for years after, it was a portable revolution. A way of listening to music on the move. Something that was not possible before. Despite the fact its ‘replacement’, the Sony Discman, was flawed, it did allow the same portability for CDs as with cassettes – and that turns forty later in the year. The Sony Walkman was not instantly affordable to all, as it was new technology and it did price many out. However, soon, it was something that became available more to the masses. Enjoying a huge wave of popularity during the 1980s and even into the 1990s, there is something rare and prized about the Sony Walkman today. Original models and pristine versions can go for a lot of money. At a time when people could only listen to music at home or on things that were large and very much not for taking with you, the Sony Walkman was launched in Japan and must have seemed futuristic! It was a definite revelation that forever altered how we would enjoy music. I want to finish with arguing why it was not about isolation. One cannot blame the Walkman for streaming services and more negative aspects of modern music. I will start with a feature from The Verge about the legendary Walkman. On its fortieth anniversary (2019), this feature explored the introduction and legacy of the Sony Walkman:
“The world changed on July 1st, 1979: the day that Sony released the iconic Walkman TPS-L2, the first real portable music player that would revolutionize the way we listened to music in a way that no other device really had ever done before. Boomboxes and portable radios had been around for a while, but the Walkman made portable music private, ushering in a whole new era of people listening to music away from home.
Forty years later and Walkmans aren’t exactly popular to use anymore (outside of things like Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy films, anyway), but the sea change that the Walkman caused in our lives is more apparent than ever.
We don’t use cassettes or CDs anymore. Nearly every mobile device we carry now can play music, storing thousands of songs and streaming tens of thousands more from the internet anywhere in the world. But the whole idea of taking music with you — that you could listen to your favorite songs on the go, without subjecting everyone nearby to your music — started with the Walkman.
And make no mistake, the Walkman was designed mainly for music. It was a simple product in that regard: according to Sony’s photo history, the original device was ridiculed at the time for lacking the ability to record tapes, but it didn’t need that feature. It even offered two 3.5mm headphone jacks (the same hardware that, until recently, was found on our far more advanced hardware today), allowing you to listen with a friend in lieu of a speaker.
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. It’s not quite the powerhouse of a brand as it once was, but 40 years on, the changes the Walkman caused in our lives and in how we relate to both music and technology are still as relevant as ever”.
I do hope that there is proper recognition of the Sony Walkman ahead of its forty-fifth anniversary. I know I am a couple of months early! I will write more about it closer to 1st July. One reason I wanted to get in this early is that there is a real lack of modern-day equivalents. Something that is a sleek and affordable version of the original. I will highlight a few similar models that are on the market – yet none quite like the Sony Walkman. This feature from The Guardian from earlier in the year talked about the collectability and nostalgic currency of something like the Sony Walkman:
“One of the Tiffany Walkmans, originally presented to the Who, was later sold by the ex-wife of the band’s late bassist John Entwistle on a 2011 episode of the US TV show Pawn Stars. After some haggling, the traders at Gold & Silver Pawn in Las Vegas agreed to pay $1,250 for it. “This is one of those weird things that I think someone’s willing to buy just to say they have it,” reasoned Pawn Stars’ Corey Harrison to his father, Rick.
But who would spend thousands on a tape player in the age of Spotify and YouTube, when virtually all your entertainment needs can be concentrated into one device in your pocket?
“Time can make easy fetishists of us all,” remarked the culture writer Niko Stratis on seeing news stories reporting that branches of Urban Outfitters in the US were selling iPods for $350 (not far off the price they were on release in the early 2000s). There is plenty of such backward-gazing trading to be found online: eBay seller Retrogadgets-UK offers a “factory-sealed” third-generation iPhone “sold for collectors only” listed at £2,499.99. US brand Retrospekt sells all manner of refurbished old tech. “Our mission is to give you a product with years of history that works like it was made yesterday,” it declares. Elsewhere you can find camcorders and digital cameras, VHS and DVD players, “vintage” Game Boys, clock radios, and everything in between – including the soundtrack to classic teen soap Beverly Hills 90210 on cassette (yours for £15.39, if that’s your thing). And a surprisingly large number of Walkmans.
You never know what treasures may be sitting in your attic. A classic yellow “sports” Walkman, for example, is a popular item among collectors. The WM-F5 from 1983 was the first designed to be “splash-proof” and came with a built-in FM radio. The sharp colour and weather-proofing led to sales soaring, Walkman collector Mark Ip tells me. “I have many of them,” he adds.
Walkmans in general are Ip’s thing. He has more than a thousand, and on his Instagram account @boxedwalkman he displays them to more than 16,000 fellow enthusiasts. The important word there is boxed: he focuses his vast collection on pristine Walkmans housed in their original packaging – though he also has several hundred unboxed ones, too. He bills himself as “cassette Walkman collector on a mission to bring back the long-lost memories of the past”. Ip also owns three Tiffany Walkmans, for which he estimates he spent $10,000.
“I’m a little bit OCD,” Ip tells me from his home in Hong Kong. “Because I’m not satisfied with only single units. I want packaging, user manuals, original headphones.” He has about 20 single Walkmans that he keeps out for personal use. The rest are in storage – they have to be kept dry, otherwise Hong Kong’s humid climate will damage the boxes. “I don’t know exactly how many boxes are in my warehouse. When I die, I’ll leave it to my son maybe,” Ip adds, though he says his son cares more about modern Apple products.
He ties his obsession to his youth. “When I was in high school, a classmate had the first model, the TPS-L2. The stereo sounded so good. And it was portable,” he says, but his family couldn’t afford it at the time (originally the cost was about $150). Later, he was able to get his hands on a Walkman, but it was only about 15 years ago, when the devices were cheap and essentially obsolete, that he began building his collection.
Ip, who is 60, and co-founded an IT and audiovisual company specialising in workplace technologies in 2004, rarely sells anything from his collection. The wider region – Hong Kong, China, Japan, South Korea – remains a hotbed of interest in ageing tech, including boomboxes, component audio systems, old analogue and 2G mobile phones and pagers. There is also a big local trade in old camera lenses, Ip says, from manufacturers such as Leica and Zeiss. Ip buys and swaps with others to fill gaps in his Walkman collection, while also finding some further afield, in the US and Europe. “Like all collectors, you are seeking perfection,” he says. “What is perfect is a new box, never touched, no scratches, no dust. It’s almost impossible, but I will do my best to patiently wait.”
PHOTO CREDIT: A Sony Walkman WM-2/PHOTO CREDIT: Felicity McCabe/The Guardian
Last year, Ip mounted an exhibition in Hong Kong displaying many of his boxed Walkmans. “This is one of my missions in Walkman collecting,” he says – to let a new generation experience it. At the exhibition, many young attenders were “seeing a cassette player for the first time”, and often had only a vague idea of them from films or their parents. “Most were genuinely curious. They were intrigued by its mechanics.”
Walkman-collecting, it seems, conforms to most tech-collector stereotypes: men in their 40s, 50s and 60s, recalling their youthful encounters with a then-nascent, exciting technology. As Ip says, “When you have a Walkman, and you have a cassette to play on it, you can go out to the street to listen to the music, and all the memories come back.”
On Stephen Ho’s eBay page, he lists old but pristine Walkmans for up to £2,999. Though, he admits, he rarely expects to sell his most expensive wares. They are largely on the site to display the extent of his vast collection and to signal the quality of what he has on offer. Mainly he sells cheaper ones when he has duplicates.
Ho, who is in his late 50s, is also from Hong Kong. He is retired now, but in the 1990s he had a job in Sony’s marketing department, working on the launch of the MiniDisc during the great “format war” between that product and Philips’s DCC player.
“Because I grew up with Sony products and I worked for Sony, I have a passion for their products,” he says. Electronic gadgets from his teenage years in the 80s are his poison. “During those years, Sony was like Apple nowadays. I was a normal teenager. I had Sony Walkman, Sony radio, everything Sony.”
In 2020, he moved to the UK under the BNO visa, allowing Hongkongers to resettle after the Chinese government crackdown on the city’s semi-autonomous status. He brought his collection, which includes hundreds of Walkmans, Discmans and MiniDisc players. He rarely pays more than £500 for an item, but he also owns one of the Tiffany special editions, for which he was willing to go higher (“Less than £2,000,” he says). But he says he’ll never put that up for sale.
He claims to be downsizing and shows me a loft room in his home in Reading, Berkshire, with drawers filled with Sony products. And yet, “I’m buying more than I’m selling,” he jokes. When we speak, he is shortly due to take a trip to Japan to find more at street markets.
There are models that were only sold in Japan, while DIY makers in China are keeping the old products alive. “Since the price of Walkmans has gone so high, people are making spare parts, which makes their lifespan longer.” There are curious ways in which older products can outlast newer, more hi-tech ones. “New things use built-in rechargeable batteries,” he says. “Once the battery is dead, the machine is dead. For old stuff they use normal batteries.”
He also likens it to older and classic cars: the mechanics were simpler, more analogue, so it is easier to tinker with and make spare parts for older models. Similarly with complex modern devices, the tech “is so tiny, so small, you can’t do it by yourself”. But with Walkmans “because of 3D-printing technology, they can print those parts. Which also extends the lifespan.”
Ho puts potential buyers into two categories. Younger people jumping on to a new trend for something old, and, inevitably, an older group that grew up with the technology. “Before social media, it was limited to older generations,” he says. “But since social media –Instagram, Facebook, whatever – teenagers have been exposed to old stuff. Old guys are buying for their memories. Young people are buying to try. They think it’s trendy, it’s interesting. It’s not limited to the Walkman; the prices for CCD [digital] cameras are rocket-high on eBay”.
There is a lot to discuss regarding the legacy of the Sony Walkman. How it could be brought up to date. I guess you can get something pretty close to the Sony Walkman today. I would love to see Sony bring out a new range that people could buy for a reasonable price. As cassettes are still around and many people are buying them, they are struggling to find devices to play them on. Rolling out a new Walkman would not seem strange of retro. Instead, it is necessary and would provide popular. Even if it is quite expensive, this cassette player is on the market. There are some more affordable options here. Look on eBay, and you can get some pretty cool options like this. There are guides like this that are useful. None really are abut Sony and a cheaper and cooler version of the original Walkman. Something that could sell for around £50, be available in a range of colours and designs. It does not need to be too high-tech. Something that could come onto the market that is sustainable, environmentally conscious and enduring. Many would say that listening to cassettes on the move is quite a solitary endeavour. Not that it is a bad thing. We are in a society where we are more isolated regarding listening to music. Not as communal as it once was. The original Sony Walkman was never about that. It provided freedom. The chance to listen to music on the move.
PHOTO CREDIT: Beyzaa Yurtkuran/Pexels
What I found, when I owned a Walkman and a Discman, is that it was great sharing music with people. Giving them an earbud and them listening to a cassette or CD that I was playing. Streaming and smartphones do not seem to be about that. I feel that a modern Walkman would perhaps not reverse that. I think it would prompt people to share music. Swap cassettes and be more engaged with one another than they might otherwise have been. On 1st July, it will be forty-five years since the Sony Walkman was introduced. It was a real breakthrough. We have modern equivalents out there, yet none that really match the original. Cassette sales are not booming, though they are steady and attracting new generations. Because of that, there is a place for cassette-playing devices. As we look ahead to an important anniversary for an iconic piece of music history, I feel it is appropriate that a new model comes out. I would definitely be interested in it. You may not be familiar with the Sony Walkman or know what it was about. I would suggest people check it out and do some reading. It was unlike anything else when it arrived in 1979. All these years later, there is this feeling it could slot right back into the marketplace. At any rate, it is well deserving of some salute. We have streaming these days. I don’t think we can blame the Walkman as starting this. Being responsible for making music ephemeral or a more isolating experience. Instead, streaming naturally came from the emergence of digital music. The Sony Walkman was always about buying cassettes and paying for music. It is true that it is at the start of a line that led to streaming, although it would be unfair to say that it killed physical music or can be blamed for what we have today. Instead, it was this explosion and wonderful piece of technology that gave people the option to enjoy music…
ON the go.