Going walkabout: 40 years of the Walkman

I will, soon, be heading off on holiday. Yay. There was a time when this meant a laborious, torturously methodical packing process: the selection of cassettes to while away the fortnight on a beach. At first, this was constrained by the 12-tape capacity of my first vinyl cassette case, until the revolution of a 36-tape case came along and opened up my world abroad. Seriously.

Before portable CD players, Sony's MiniDisc and Philips' DCC format, then MP3 players and now the iPhone, the cassette was the mobile format of choice, and all thanks to the Sony Walkman, which made its debut 40 years ago this month. We are also, now, so used to seeing people plugged into their phones wherever they go that it almost doesn't seem possible that there was a time when music on the move either meant a portable radio (with one of those comical 'deaf aid' earpieces) or in extreme circumstances, an old-style shoebox cassette recorder with headphones attached. Which would make you look a knob. Somewhere in the annals of time, too, there were portable record players, which stretched the concept of portability somewhat.

So when, on 1 July, 1979, Sony introduced the Walkman (initially known as the 'Stowaway' in Britain and the 'Roundabout' in the United States - hats off, Sony marketing department), the Japanese tech giant launched an entirely new music consumption culture. Not to mention fuel for Ben Elton routines about hissy Dire Straits headphone leakage on the Tube. The Walkman TPS-L2, to give its proper name, was the result of Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka asking his design team to slim down existing cassette players, and adapt the existing Sony Pressman tape recorder (so named to appeal to journalists) into a more pocketable package. Some 30 years later, Sony settled a legal dispute with German inventor Andreas Pavel, who'd claimed that he'd patented the personal stereo in 1977, two years before Sony brought out the Walkman, but had been unable to find a manufacturer for it. "Mr Pavel invented the device known today as the Walkman," reported The New York Times. "But it took more than 25 years of battling the Sony Corporation and others in courts and patent offices around the world before he finally won the right to say it," after the Japanese company had reportedly settled the dispute with a multi-million-dollar some.

Still, though, in 1979, the Walkman was hardly pocket sized - constrained by the cassette and tape mechanism and generally being old-school, pre-digital. But it was a revolution. Consumer technology, especially that coming out of Japan, has progressively followed a path of miniaturisation,  with the personal music player arguably reaching the minimum design limit with devices like the Apple iPod Shuffle (I still use a seventh-generation iPod Nano, mainly because its 16GB hard drive can no longer be arbitrarily tampered with by Apple, as happens to the iTunes library on my iPhone...). In fact, with standalone music players giving way to music being almost exclusively carried on our increasingly larger smartphones, portable music is seemingly returning to the dimensions of that first Walkman.

Not that the original was an instant success: just 50,000 of the $150 players were sold in the first two months. But by 1983, cassettes were outselling vinyl records for the first time in recorded music history, fuelled largely by the Walkman and its establishment of the 'personal stereo' as a new consumer electronics category. Design and functionality evolved, with Sony adding the ability to play so-called metal tapes, along with features like Dolby noise reduction and FM/AM radios. There was even a solar-powered Walkman, a clever move for a device listened to on the beach, though before global warming became a thing, a risky proposition for those holidaying in the UK.

Picture: Sony

Incredibly, Sony only ended production of tape-based Walkman products nine years ago, the result of the market shift towards digital music. The Walkman brand remains today, attached to Sony's range of high-resolution digital audio players (including the £2500 WM1Z ' Signature Series' device). Given that Sony sold more than 200 million Walkmans during the lifetime of the tape player, it's no surprise that you can still find them on eBay, catnip to retro types who are, bafflingly, fuelling a minor comeback for the cassette. A report by the BPI this week revealed that nearly 35,000 albums on cassette were sold in the UK during the first half of 2019, an increase from 18,000 last year.

Quite who is buying them, though is unclear, though Billie Eilish is proving to be the winner in this movement, selling 4,000 copies of her debut album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in the tape format. Last year's tape best-seller was The 1975's A Brief Enquiry Into Online Relationships, bizarrely suggesting a teenage demographic for the old cassette format. However, what might be driving this trend for fan-heavy sales may be the fact that most of these cassettes have been sold from the artists' own official online merchandise stores, with many available only on a limited-edition basis. The chances are therefore good that they may never see the spindles of a tape player. Which may be a good thing. Before discarded plastic bottles became the scourge of lay-bys and suburban hedges, it was magnetic cassette tape, thrown away in frustration after being extracted by pencil from the tape heads of a Walkman or car stereo, thus rendering lovingly-curated compilations and £8.99 albums from Our Price utterly useless. See, there is something going for digital music.