Sony Walkman

A recorder with the recording taken out

The Walkman began as a complaint about weight. Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka listened to music on long flights on a TC-D5, a portable stereo cassette recorder weighing around 1.7 kilograms and the size of a textbook. It was also miserable to travel with. He asked executive deputy president Norio Ohga for something simpler: "I can do without recording, so could you just install the circuits for stereo sound into this Pressman?"

The Pressman was Sony's palm-sized monaural tape recorder, sold since 1978 and past five hundred thousand units. Ohga passed the request to Kozo Ohsone, head of the tape recorder division, whose engineers removed the recording head and the built-in speaker and put stereo playback in their place. Tried with whatever headphones were at hand, it sounded unexpectedly good. Ibuka walked in, picked up the headphones and approved.

Akio Morita saw the business in it at once. In February 1979 he gathered young staff from engineering, design, planning and marketing and set the brief: a playback-only cassette player with headphones in the box, on shelves before the summer holidays, under forty thousand yen. That left four months.

Thirty thousand units and a quiet first month

The team was converging on 35,000 yen when Morita pointed out that 1979 was Sony's thirty-third anniversary and fixed the price at 33,000 yen, roughly $150 then. The opening production run was 30,000 units, about double what a strong month looked like for a tape recorder in that market.

Sony announced it on 22 June 1979 with a stunt rather than a press release. Reporters were bussed from the Sony Building in Ginza to Yoyogi Park, handed a Walkman each and told to press play. Music and a spoken explanation arrived through the headphones while staff in Walkman T-shirts jogged past. Most papers ignored it.

Three thousand units had sold by the end of July, which looked like confirmation for colleagues who had argued that nobody would buy a tape player that could not record. Sony went outside instead. Staff rode the Yamanote loop line wearing Walkmans, spent Sundays in Shinjuku and Ginza putting headphones on strangers, and magazine advertisements with pop idols did the rest. The opening batch sold out in August and shops stayed sold out for six months.

The one part that had to be invented

Almost everything inside the TPS-L2 was existing Sony hardware: the mechanism came from the Pressman, and the work was mostly about making it fail-safe. The exception was the connector. Stereo headphones used quarter-inch jacks and mini jacks existed only in mono, so the prototype fed a stereo headset through two separate mono sockets. Before shipping, Sony developed a stereo 3.5 mm mini plug and matching jack, the one genuinely new component.

That plug outlived the machine, becoming the default headphone connector for portable audio for three decades. The H·AIR headphones were new too: about 50 grams where typical headphones weighed 300 to 400, and 23 mm drivers against 50 mm and larger in over-ear designs. Morita had argued that enormous cups on a pocket-sized player would look absurd.

Selling a name nobody liked

The name merged Pressman with Superman. Colleagues thought it was bad English and Morita overruled them on the grounds that the buyer was young and would decide. The doubt returned abroad, where overseas sales companies refused the word: the same machine was sold as Soundabout in the United States, Stowaway in Britain and Freestyle in Australia, and the TPS-L2 reached America in June 1980.

Travellers kept asking for the Walkman they had seen in Japan, so Morita made the name global at a sales convention in the United States in April 1980. By 1986 the word was in the Oxford English Dictionary, and in several markets it became the generic term for any personal stereo.

What it changed

Sony had sold more than a hundred million Walkmans by 1989, ten years after launch, and 186 million cassette units by 1999. Cassette production reached roughly 220 million players before the line ended, and cumulative sales across cassette, CD, MiniDisc and flash models passed 400 million by 2019. Within a decade Sony held half the United States market for the category it had invented.

The cultural effect ran wider than the unit count. The Compact Cassette, licensed free by Philips on condition of strict compatibility, was a convenience format until the Walkman made it personal; by 1983 cassettes were outselling vinyl records. The device arrived alongside the aerobics boom and produced a behaviour academics labelled the Walkman effect: the listener choosing what to hear, and declining to hear everything else. Competitors copied the machine within a couple of years, evidence that a new category had appeared.

The end of the cassette line

Sony spent two decades trying to repeat the trick on its own terms. The Discman moved the idea to compact discs and was folded into the Walkman brand in 1997; MiniDisc players followed in 1992 and stayed a niche. The cassette Walkman was discontinued in Japan in 2010, the last American model being the WM-FX290W, released in 2004.

The digital transition went worse. Sony's first flash-based Network Walkman arrived in December 1999, but early models supported only Sony's own ATRAC format, with no MP3 until 2004, to protect the music business. Apple's iPod took the market that followed: Sony's share of American digital player sales was 1.9 percent in 2006, though it held 43 to 48 percent in Japan in 2009 and 2010. The format died. The habit of walking around with music in your ears did not.