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.

The silencing of his master's voice

© HMV/James McCauley

What Ho!, viewers. It's been a while since I've blogged, but it's the Christmas holidays and, in a welcome break from work (coupled with food-induced imobility), I'm back in front of a steaming keyboard. What has coaxed me out of a lengthy absence from the blogosphere has been the troubling news today of HMV's second collapse in the space of six years, barely three days after gift cards (or "record tokens", in old money) would have been received by teenagers eager to get out and spend their newly acquired wealth on music, video games, DVDs (or, for the more resolution-sophisticated, a Blu-ray Disc) or any other of the home entertainment-related items HMV is still, evidently, selling via its bricks-and-mortar retail outfits. Except that they wouldn't have been. 

The HMV Group Plc, to give the chain its proper name, has become the first casualty of Christmas 2018 after poor sales and 'footfall' (i.e. the number of us walking through its doors) in the run up to the big day. Should the 97-year-old company disappear completely, it will not only wipe out 2,025 jobs but also it's status as the last remaining high street chain selling physical music and video products, unless you count Sainsbury's knocking out Ed Sheeran CDs and Davina McCall DVDs as a legitimate part of the media purchasing culture.

No one, frankly, should be surprised, as sad as this news is. HMV came close to collapse almost exactly six years ago, as the move towards online streaming led to sales diving by more than 10% and HMV calling in administrators. The company was eventually taken over be restructuring specialists Hilco who closed half the group's stores leaving 125 open, including the flagship shop on London's Oxford Street. The restructuring appeared, at least for a couple of years, to work, and in 2015 HMV even overtook Amazon as the UK's biggest phyisca-format music retailer (though that number also included HMV's online sales). Before that milestone, Hilco executive chairman Paul McGowan told The Telegraph in 2014 that the HMV business was now "very profitable" and did not have a single loss-making store left in the UK. Four years ago things did seem to be looking up: quarterly sales were improving by almost 10% and sales of albums over-the-counter were up by 12 per cent. 

The problem with this picture - and you'll understand me typing this through gritted teeth - is that while there have been improvements in the sale of vinyl records (and hats off to HMV for making vinyl gondolas the centrepieces of its stores), these have been somewhat niche sales by comparison to the relentless rise of online streaming services. Why go out and browse for new music or a DVD when it's there on your phone, iPad or PC at the click of a button? The culture I have enjoyed since my teens of curating music ownership and, later, my video library when VHS came along, has been eroded by the convenience of not having to get off the sofa to go and buy it.

I know there's not much point resisting this, Kanute-like. The inexorable growth of Netflix, Amazon Prime (even at the expense of Amazon's own retail operations), iTunes and all the rest has done for the home media library. Up to a point, of course. I can see the point of no longer buying DVDs and Blu-ray Discs: when you can rent (or 'own' them) in high, 4K quality without them taking up space in your living room shelving, it's a no-brainer. And it's not even an argument to say that there are films and box sets that you do watch again and again, because unless you are the most compulsive-obsessive about The Godfather or The Sopranos, you're not going to sit through either every day of the week.

Music, however, is different. Yes, I can listen to a Beatles playlist on Spotify (as I did, perfectly happily while wrapping my Christmas presents last week) via my iPad, but that is not the same experience. Perverse - and somewhat fetishistic - as it may be, as long as I still get a thrill from buying something new from my local record shop, getting it home, unsleeving it and either putting it on the turntable or in the CD player, I will continue to be that middle-aged bloke who readily parts company with a stupid amount of hard-earned for a 'super deluxe edition' of rare and previously unreleased Tom Petty songs. Thus, I'm quite proud to be keeping my local independent record shop, Casbah Records in Greenwich, in turnover. And, before anyone asks, I'll only order something from Amazon if Graham, Casbah's always helpful co-owner, is unlikely or unable to get it in.

At the time Hilco was claiming that HMV was on the up again, Paul McGowan said that it had strategically focused on offering something that other retailers couldn't, like in-store live performances. That, however, might only have a limited appeal, especially in generating impulse purchases. McGowan was, obviously, correct when he said that clearly Amazon or Tesco couldn't and wouldn't compete with that. But here, however, is where independents do the fan experience better. Banquet Records in Kingston-upon-Thames, annexed its main retail space to create a dedicated performance room, and has also become involved in local promotional gigs by heavyweight acts like The 1975. In a high student catchment area like Kingston, that makes eminent sense and hard to imagine HMV matching.

In 2013 retail analyst Mark Saunders told The Guardian that HMV's business model had "simply become increasingly irrelevant and unsustainable". Then music and film downloads accounted for 73.4% of media purchases. Today that ratio is higher still as Netflix, Apple, Spotify and even YouTube have eaten further into what used to be regarded as "home entertainment", but is now available digitally across everything from mobile platforms to big-screen TVs as, simply, an app. Of course, evolving consumption habits isn't the only set of nails being hammered into HMV's coffin. The British high street is currently a turbulent place to be. Hilco's McGowan said, in a statement, that "Even an exceptionally well-run and much-loved business such as HMV cannot withstand the tsunami of challenges facing UK retailers over the last 12 months on top of such a dramatic change in consumer behaviour in the entertainment market," with the chain's collapse coming on top of retailers like Poundworld, Maplin and Toys R Us entering administration, with others like Superdry, Carpetright and Card Factory issuing ominous profit warnings.

HMV's travails, however, go beyond simply being another victim of high street pressures, even if high rents and low consumer confidence have had their impact. The simple fact is that people are now going no further than an app, a mouse click or a remote control button to acquire home entertainment, even if the industry body, the Entertainment Retailers Association maintains that physical music, video and games products still represent a £2 billion market, with the likes of Sheeran and films like The Greatest Showman contributing.

The question for me is, realistically, how long this market will remain. There is a generation of teenagers which, for the most part, doesn't actually own any music or video. And they're not even paying subscription services, either: YouTube does, it would appear, constitute a large proportion of entertainment consumption for digital-native teenagers and twentysomethings. Seeing my girlfriend's 17-year-old-daughter enjoy listening to music on vinyl is one of life's genuine pleasures, but even I know that she and her friends are following a latent fashion. I, for one, will continue to buy albums, but even I've stopped buying DVDs altogether. Mind you, I very rarely have the attention span these days longer than watching a Mock The Week repeat on Dave, so perhaps I'm losing the ability to do anything more than point a remote control at a set-top box. Maybe, even, I'm the cause of HMV's collapse? I hope not. Sad as it is to see a venerable and historic name go into administration for a second time, reluctantly I've got to accept that it's just the way it is, even if with the  chain's demise disappears the emotional enjoyment of endless Saturday afternoons browsing for new music that I couldn't wait to get home, unpack and play. Forget the arguments about sound and picture quality, it's that fetishistic, tactile experience that will die when the physical media experience finally pops its clogs. Today's news about HMV doesn't half feel like that is accelerating.

Deserting island discs

It used to be that you knew you were getting older when policemen appeared to be getting younger. Now it is technology which might still seem new but has aged incredibly quickly. Over my career in tech PR I've seen technologies rise, arc and disappear in what seems like the blink of an eye: as part of the Philips PR machine in the '90s and Noughties, I was involved in launching several consumer electronics formats, including the DVD, the recordable CD, the recordable DVD, the Digital Compact Cassette, Digital VHS, CD-i and, latterly, Blu-ray Disc. Most, it has to be said, have either been superseded or didn’t survive infancy, even though their patents - lucrative in some cases - have been absorbed into the revenue streams of the companies who created them.

Today, Philips no longer invests in consumer electronics, preferring to be a healthtech concern, presumably because the margins on capital equipment like CT scanners for hospitals far outstrip the meagre profits to be made on a TV (for such a major purchase, you'd be amazed how little the manufacturer makes on it...), although brand licensing has ensured the Philips name has remained in the home entertainment space. The reality, however, is that, 11 years after Apple introduced the iPhone, the smartphone has largely replaced TVs, video players and hifi systems amongst young consumers. Look at Apple’s marketing of its latest iPhone, even making a virtue of bigger screens and better speakers purely to appeal to those who prefer to watch movies on something barely bigger than an old fashioned cheque book.

Given that streaming via platforms like Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, plus broadcasters’ on-demand and catch-up services, has become as commonplace today as terrestrial TV and Blockbuster video rentals were 30 years ago, it’s not surprising to, this week, see news from the John Lewis department store chain that it is drawing the curtain down on the DVD player, having seen a 40% drop in player sales over the last year. While this isn’t necessarily a vital-signs indication of the health of DVD itself, the revelation - contained in the 2018 John Lewis & Partners Retail Report - is a sign that one piece of technology beneath the living room television is in decline. What this doesn’t say is that sales of Blu-ray Disc players - the ultra-high definition disc format that was developed (by a consortium of technology companies including ‘usual suspects’ like Philips and Sony) largely to succeed DVD - are still relatively healthy, even if, like most ‘high-volume electronics’ devices, price erosion has brought down the cost of a Blu-ray player from around £1000 in 2002 to as low as £70 for a basic box today.

DVD does now date back to what is a lifetime in technology: when I started working for Philips at the beginning of 1995 there was already, in the finest traditions of the consumer electronics industry, a battle raging between competing technologies to be considered the 'standard' for a CD-sized disc that could store entire films in one go. In the blue corner was Philips and Sony with its Multimedia Compact Disc (MMCD) format. In the red corner, a collection of tech companies like Toshiba, Matsushita, Hitachi, JVC, Pioneer and Thomson who, along with their Hollywood buddy Time Warner (i.e. Warner Bros) were backing Super Density Disc (SD). While industry observers and trade media hacks lofted their eyes skywards at the prospect of another Betamax-v-VHS battle, a round of the sort of shuttle diplomacy normally applied to preventing actual wars brought peace to the world of digital video and, at a press conference at the IFA trade fair in Berlin in August 1995, declared their eternal love for each other. DVD was born.

The news that John Lewis is now, 23 years on, dropping DVD players from its shelves is no more than a reflection of its own stocking strategy, says Gill Hind of Enders Analysis, who points out that it's as much about the retailer's desire to keep its shelves full of the latest innovations which carry higher sticker prices and better margins. Beyond the headlines, the DVD itself, on the other hand, soldiers on, just.

"I think the bigger surprise is just how resilient the format continues to be," says leading home entertainment journalist Steve May. "Sales data from the British Association for Screen Entertainment, covering the first six months of 2018, reveals that DVD accounted for 64.7 per cent of video sales. Digital formats trailed at 22.4 per cent, with Blu-ray Disc following behind with 12.9 per cent. Streaming services "may be picking up subscribers at a rate of knots" says Steve, but those who want the best in picture and sound quality are sticking with the physical format of Blu-ray Disc. And the innovation cycle in Blu-ray goes on: “Blu-ray players replaced dedicated DVD players in terms of value some time ago," he adds, "just as the latest Ultra High Definition Blu-ray Disc players are now ousting regular Blu-ray decks.”

While the higher-end quality of Blu-ray remains popular with videophiles, DVD is hanging on, probably due to the combination of convenience, good picture quality (when we demonstrated DVD versus VHS it was the difference between a clean and dirty window) and, above all, dirt-cheap prices. No surprise, then, that one in two DVDs are sold as point-of-sale impulse buys at supermarkets, while 10% of DVDs get snapped up at supposedly 'non-traditional' retailers, such as garden centres and petrol stations, according to the British Association for Screen Entertainment. While streaming has clearly become the dominant vehicle for watching movies at home (accounting for more than four-fifths of the £2.7 billion UK video market last year) Steve May maintains that “there is plenty of life still in physical media”. For example, Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk sold 640,000 copies on DVD and Blu-ray combined, while last year’s most popular film release - Disney's Beauty And The Beast - sold 1.5 million copies across both 'physical' and 'digital' formats.

Standalone DVD players may be going out of fashion but “backwards compatibility” in the Blu-ray hardware standard has meant that Blu-ray players can still play all those hundreds of DVDs currently piling up in living room cupboards probably only a few feet from the TV. Which means that disc libraries will remain for some time yet. The question is, what these ageing, dust-gathering DVDs will look like. Many in my own library were bought at the time when they were first-generation transfers. Home video companies have been very canny in re-releasing titles as formats have been updated (I actually own four different copies of Heat and have lost track of the versions of The Godfather in my collection...). At the same time, TV sets themselves have evolved. A year after the DVD was born, Philips introduced the very first flat TV, a 42-inch gas plasma number costing 30,000 deutschemarks, roughly £13,000 in today's money. Now, you can buy a 43-inch LCD TV for less than £370. It's not an entirely accurate comparison, however. That first flat TV was, frankly, rubbish from a picture quality point of view, but that didn't stop Philips selling every single one they made, often to achingly-cool advertising agencies (and one particular radio DJ...) wanting to be the first to own a TV set you could hang on the wall like a painting.

Television and video formats have often leapfrogged each other, much like Trigger's broom in Only Fools And Horses (17 new heads and 14 new handles in 20 years...), but today there is a narrowing of technologies. With broadcasters and streaming services offering premium content like football and film channels with 4K quality and, at some point in the not-too distant future, 8K resolution, it's arguable that the optical disc that has lingered on since the CD (or, even earlier, LaserDisc) will be discarded to museums. I'll admit, as I spend an increasing amount of time on planes, having a library of downloaded movies on my iPad, with its Retina screen and Bluetooth headphones, is a convenient way of catching up with films and TV box sets. But nothing can beat the experience of watching at home on a big screen TV (70-inch is now the new normal, according to John Lewis, compared to only 36-inch in 2010), and with Blu-ray continuing to set the standard, the spirit of the DVD lives on through its successor. And you still have to get out of your seat to put it in the player, but then that was always part of the fun, wasn't it?