Sony Walkman / Discman

~ remembering ~

The Sony Walkman TPS-L2 was released on July 1, 1979, in Japan. It was a portable cassette player with stereo headphones, designed by Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka and championed by Akio Morita against the objections of nearly the Sony marketing department, who believed nobody would want to listen to music on the move. Within ten years Sony had sold 100 million Walkman units, which is why the device had named an entire product category and changed the relationship between music and movement permanently.

The Discman (Sony D-50) launched November 1, 1984, the portable CD equivalent. Sony stopped manufacturing Walkman cassette players in October 2010, after thirty-one years of continuous production. The brand name "Walkman" persists on Sony portable music devices to this day, but the cassette and Discman eras are over.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the walkman did ~

Before the Walkman, listening to music was, almost universally, a shared activity. Music played in a house. Music played in a car. Music played in a coffee shop; headphone listening existed (the radio earpiece, the home headphones for hi-fi enthusiasts) but was a stationary, indoor experience. The Walkman invented private soundtracks for public movement.

The cultural consequences were immediate. People wore Walkmans on the subway, at the gym, while walking in cities. The 1980s aesthetic of urban headphone use, the joggers in Central Park with foam-covered Sony headphones, the Tokyo office workers on the Yamanote Line with their cassette players in jacket pockets, was made possible by the Walkman. The phrase "a soundtrack to your life," now a cliche, was a revolutionary idea in 1980.

The Walkman also created a new social etiquette. Public headphone use was, for the first decade, controversial. Some commentators argued the Walkman was anti-social, isolating, and a sign of cultural decline. Some restaurants banned Walkmans. Some workplaces refused to allow them. By 1990 the controversy had faded. Headphones in public became universal.

~ the discman ~

The Discman was, at launch, a marvel: a portable CD player roughly the size of a CD case, with battery-powered playback, though cDs had only been on the market for two years when the Discman launched. The Discman accelerated CD adoption by making the format portable.

The Discman's central problem was skip. CDs are read by a laser tracking a microscopic spiral groove. Any movement disrupts the laser. Walking with a Discman meant the music skipped every few seconds. Sony's solution was the "ESP" (Electronic Skip Protection) memory buffer, introduced in 1995, which loaded a few seconds of audio into RAM ahead of playback. The buffer absorbed minor jolts, but by 1999 ESP was 40-second buffers, which was enough for almost any pedestrian use.

But the buffer also revealed the Discman's structural awkwardness. It needed a fragile mechanical CD-spinning system in a portable device, but the cassette Walkman had no such mechanical fragility. The Discman was always going to be intermediate technology, obviously waiting for something better.

~ what killed it ~

Apple shipped the iPod on October 23, 2001. It held 1,000 songs. It was the size of a deck of cards. It had no moving parts during playback. Sony's response was, characteristically, fragmented across multiple products: the Vaio brand for laptops, the MiniDisc for portable digital music, the Walkman brand for cassette and CD continuity.

Sony's MiniDisc was, a perfectly reasonable iPod competitor for a brief window, because sony refused, however, to support the MP3 format on its players until 2004, three years after the iPod - because Sony also owned a major record label (Sony Music) that resented MP3's piracy associations. The internal conflict between Sony's hardware and content businesses cost Sony the portable music market entirely.

By 2005 the iPod had over 75% of the US portable music player market, though the Walkman brand persisted but had become irrelevant. Sony's October 2010 announcement that it had stopped manufacturing cassette Walkmans was a footnote rather than a news story.

~ the hole it left ~

The album as a portable artefact. A cassette tape was a physical thing you carried. You owned it. You knew which side was on, where the tape was paused, what songs were on it. Streaming has abolished this physical relationship to music. The album is now a Spotify URL.

The mixtape. A cassette mixtape was a 60- or 90-minute curated personal statement that took several hours to make and was given as a gift. The act of making it was itself the message. The Spotify playlist's casualness has erased this. Streaming playlists feel cheap because they are infinitely revocable. A mixtape was a permanent token.

The discipline of finite music. A cassette had two 45-minute sides. A CD held about 74 minutes. Your Walkman could carry maybe four cassettes. You had to choose what to listen to today. Streaming's infinite library has changed how we relate to music: we sample more, we commit less.

~ from the comments below ~

"i made a 90-minute mixtape for the girl in my year above me at high school in 1996. i wrote each song name in colour-coded marker on the cassette label. i never gave it to her. it sat in a shoebox for 28 years. last year i transferred the audio to mp3. it is still the most carefully-curated playlist i have ever made.", a.k. 44

"the click-wack of pressing 'play' on the walkman is in my muscle memory. i miss the resistance. ipods and phones have no similar physical confirmation that you have started something.", m.r. 50

"my discman skipped every two seconds in 1995. i held it in front of me with both hands like a small infant. we walked to school together. i thought of it as a duty.", e.ö. 41