The origins, rise and decline of the Sony Walkman
Let's dive deep to understand how Sony launched walkman, how did it scale and what led to its eventual decline
This week I am curious about the The origins, rise and decline of the Sony Walkman. I was watching The Last of Us, and the lead character Ellie was listening to songs on her Sony Walkman. I was surprised as I hadn’t heard the term Walkman in a while, and that got me thinking about how ubiquitous Walkman once was and how it is nonexistent today.
That got me further curious about how Sony launched walkman, how did it scale and what led to its eventual decline.
How did people listen to music before the Walkman?
Cassette tapes were invented by Lou Ottens at Philips and were released in August 1963.1 Philips also invented the Boombox in 1965 to allow people to play radio recordings onto cassette tapes, although its quality was subpar.2 Better quality boom boxes were soon developed in Japan in early 1970s and soon became popular because of its size and impressive sound quality.
Also the rise of dual cassette recorders where you can playback and record tapes at the same time meant that people were pirating music and creating their custom cassette tapes, also known as mixtapes. Music was inherently social before the introduction of Walkman. People carried large Boomboxes and played music in public, where it is said that the bigger the box you carried, the cooler you were.
There certainly were portable music players in the market, but they were clunky and were mostly used by journalists for recording. In fact NASA furnished every astronaut with a Sony portable audio player from 1968 onwards to record personal mission logs and it was also used by astronauts to play their favorite mixtapes in space.3
How was Walkman created?
One of the cofounders of Sony, Masaru Ibuka was an audiophile and he loved listening to Opera music. He used to take his large cassette player on the road to listen to Opera music. This cassette player was mainly used for sound recording and was used specifically by journalists and hence it was called the Pressman.4 Moreover the headphones available at that time were bulky and weighed 400 grams.
Masaru found this to be impractical and thought there must be a better way and thus tasked his team to come up with a solution. Kozo Ohsone, the general manager of the Tape Recorder Business Division was tasked to work on the stereo only version of the Pressman.
The team removed the extra components required for recording, added a stereo amplifier and hence the Walkman was born.5 Morever, Sony also invented compact and extremely light headphones weighing just 50 grams with comparable sound quality.
Launching and marketing the Walkman
The Sony walkman was launched in June 1979 in an unusual fashion. Journalists were taken to Yoyogi park in Tokyo and were given a Walkman to wear. The journalists listened to an explanation of the Walkman, while the Sony team carried various demonstrations such as a young man and a woman listening to walkman while riding a tandem bicycle.
Sony anticipated that they would sell 5000 units a month, while they ended up selling 30000 units instead. It launched at Soundabout in the US, Freestyle in Australia and Sweden and Stowaway in the UK. However, Sony started using the Walkman brand worldwide from the early 1980s.
However when Walkman first launched in the US, it faced with a lot of criticism.6 Critics questioned the moral implications of headphones on how it can lead to isolation and people getting into accidents while listening to the Walkman did not help the cause either. The New Jersey township of Woodbridge went one step further and banned wearing Walkman while driving, biking or even crossing the streets.
How did the Walkman scale?
To overcome skepticism around Walkman, Sony launched several aggressive ad campaigns to show how cool wearing a Walkman was. The early advertisements had hip, fun, attractive people dancing out in the streets using Walkman and that increased its sex appeal.7 Moreover, MTV also launched in 1981 and that meant that music was more accessible and the demand for music was much higher than it was before.8
Sony was constantly understanding customer needs and upgrading the Walkman with several features such as introducing a his and hers feature to appeal to couples listening to music together. A hotline feature was introduced so that listeners could talk to others while lowering the music volume resulting in Walkman becoming a more social product. People also said that they were working out more while listening to Walkman increased and hence a sports version was introduced, which became an instant hit.
By 1989, 10 years after the launch, over 100 million Walkman units were sold worldwide and over 180 million units were sold by 1999.9 In 1986, the term “Walkman” also entered the Oxford dictionary. Walkman had established itself as a cultural icon and also featured in several popular movies of the time.
What led to the Walkman’s decline?
Technology always evolves and by 1990s Compact Discs (CDs) were able to hold more songs with a refined audio quality. As CD players rose in the market, the appeal of the Walkman began to fade and in-fact, Sony also introduced a CD audio player and named it the Discman.
The actual demise of Walkman was the introduction of the iPod in 2001, where the entire digital library could fit into the pocket and people did not need to have a Walkman anymore. The Walkman was discontinued in the US in 2004 and in Japan in 2010, however the Walkman brand lives on as several music players by Sony are sold as Walkman even today.
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So this week, I was curious about the origins, rise and decline of the Walkman. Do subscribe to my blog to read about different things I am curious about every week. My name is Kushal and I currently work as a Senior Product Manager at SoFi. I also do blogging, quizzing, podcasting and standup comedy for fun.