Sony announced that they are going to cancel production of the Walkman this year. After asking the obvious question of “They still make Walkmen? Who was the product manager who kept that business alive for this long?” we should still take the time to look back on what is one of the most important products of our age. Really, the Walkman shaped music and cultural history.
Until the Walkman music was a very stationary experience. You had your stereo system often complete with fake wood paneling to make it look more like furniture than entertainment (this held true for televisions and the Atari 2600 as well.) To listen to music you were typically confined to one space. Even with radios be they transistor or boom box you were still faced with limitations of either size, reception or broadcast range. You couldn’t listen to a boom box just by yourself. Or you could but it kind of defeated the entire purpose.
The Walkman wasn’t the first music player that caused people to wear headphones. Stereos and prog rock did that first. But the Walkman was the first player that made you wear headphones in public. It created the first attempt at having an individualized soundtrack for your life. You dropped in the cassette, put on the headphones, pressed play and suddenly you were in a different world than everyone else around you. You were having an individualized experience in a crowd. Nothing had really provided that type of release from the world before.
Think about what the Walkman spawned. You have the mixtape. True, it could be played on any cassette deck but we all know that it was meant to be played on a Walkman where only the intended listener would get the full meaning of the songs. You have the jogging industry where it is difficult to imagine people running without headphones on. The Discman (of which I probably have a half dozen broken versions of somewhere in my apartment) was the obvious descendent along with the iPod. But you also have portable DVD players and electronic books and every other type of media that has been made portable. The Walkman is the father of all of them.
To be sure it was a flawed machine. It ate up batteries like no one’s business. The radio that was standard on most of them had the worst reception ever to the point that in order to listen to your favorite station clearly you had to hold it at a 47 degree angle against your head. It would occasionally eat tapes and tapes themselves would fade after repeated use. If you dropped it (especially in the Discman era) the thing was pretty much doomed. And there is the fact that my hearing has probably been irreparably damaged from it. But man, did it help get me in to music.
(Though honestly, when was the last time you saw a Walkman used? Or a cassette tape available for sale. I’m all for old technology and I adore analog but this one may have seen its day.)
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