July 4, 2025 • 46 mins
This week, we’re revisiting one of our favorite episodes — all about the Sony Walkman. Jonathan Strickland dives into why Time named the portable device number 47 on a list of the 50 most influential gadgets of all time. How did the Walkman become a thing, and what influence has it had on how we experience music?
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Ask Hey, it's Cara Price, host of tech Stuff. We're
taking a week off, but we'll have fresh episodes for
you next Wednesday. You won't want to miss Oz's conversation
with the co founder and CEO of Roadblocks. If you've
always wondered what draws ninety five million people to a
gaming platform, definitely check out their conversation next week. In
(00:30):
lieu of the headlines today, we wanted to share an
episode of tech Stuff from September twenty twenty four about
what makes the Sony Walkman one of the most influential
gadgets of all time. In the episode you're about to hear,
Jonathan Strickland tells us how the Walkman came to be
and about its lasting impact on how we experience music.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Take a listen. Welcome to tech Stuff, production from iHeartRadio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
(01:09):
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and
how the tech are you So? Back in twenty sixteen,
an actual a group of writers writing for Time magazine
or at least Time dot Com, assembled a list of
what they called the fifty most influential gadgets of all time.
(01:31):
They said that the list was quote ordered by influence
end quote, and maybe that's the case. I do find
it a little hard to swallow because number fifty on
their list, as in the bottom of the list, was
the Apple iPhone. Now, y'all, I am not the biggest
fan of Apple. I don't own an iPhone, but I
(01:54):
think if I were to make a list of most
influential gadgets of all time, the iPhone would be way
higher up on that list than the very bottom. You know,
the iPhone really ushered in the era of the consumer smartphone.
It was not the first smartphone. Apple rarely ever brings
a product to market as the first of its kind.
(02:15):
They bring refined products to the market, and it was
the first smartphone to see huge success with a mainstream audience,
not just you know, executives on the go or executives
who wanted to have a technological status symbol. Plus, I mean,
the entire nature of the web changed due to a
(02:36):
shift toward mobile computing, and I think we have to
lay that largely at the feet of the Apple iPhone.
While the iPhone is not the most popular smartphone in
the world, I think that it's really what got the
trend moving toward mobile computing, and that in turn changed
(02:57):
really like the entire web. So I would put it
higher on the list. Then my guess is that making
a list of the fifty most influential gadgets is hard.
And anyway, today's episode is not about the iPhone at all.
It's just this was the article that kind of launched
me into where I wanted to go today. So instead
of talking about number fifty, because I've done episodes about
the iPhone before, I thought we would talk about number
(03:19):
forty seven on this list. So this is more influential
than the iPhone according to that group of writers, and
it's the Sony Walkman, as in the portable cassette player.
It's still not very high up on the list, but
you know, what can you do? So the Walkman created
the chance for folks to experience pre recorded audio in
(03:41):
a pretty new way, a way that was portable, and
it let them create a kind of bubble around themselves
even if they were walking around in public. And it
meant you weren't tethered to like a wall outlet or
lugging around a large tape deck or tape recorder, so
that you could listen to your pre recorded cassettes. You
could just PLoP in some batteries, a pair of double
(04:04):
A batteries into this thing. You put in your favorite
audio cassette, You plug in your headphones, put them on
your ears, you push play, you head out into the world.
I think it's easy for us to take for granted
how portable the music experience is today. You know, the
fact that we had MP three players, iPods, and then
smartphones and streaming services and all that that's transformed the
(04:27):
way we experience music in large part, but once upon
a time that wasn't so much of an option. So
let's turn back the clock and learn about the development,
the release, and the impact of the Sony Walkman. And
before we get to that, we have to have some preamble,
because you know, this is tech stuff. You know tech stuff.
I like to talk about the history of technologies, and
(04:48):
not just the technology, but the stuff that led to
the development of that tech. So let's talk about recorded
media and the development of the cassette tape medium. Now
I've done full episodes about the en of recorded media.
How one of the earliest versions was recording sound to
cylinders that were coated in wax. Recording to a wax
(05:10):
cylinder essentially involved shouting into an acoustic horn, and that
acoustic horn at the narrow end had a little membrane
that was connected to a needle, and the membrane would
vibrate when sound waves would come into the horn. The
needle that vibrates would carve into the wax on the cylinder.
(05:31):
The cylinder would be turned and the needle would start
to carve a spiral into the cylinder. You could take
the carved cylinder and put that into a player, which
essentially did the same process, but in reverse. You would
put a stylist like another needle, and fit it into
the groove in the cylinder. You would begin to rotate
(05:53):
the cylinder. The needle would travel through the groove and
it would vibrate as it did so, which would cause
a memor brain to vibrate at the narrow end of
an acoustic horn, And if you listened real carefully at
the wide end of the acoustic horn, you would be
able to hear the recorded sound, the playback of whatever
sound had been recorded originally. Now, it didn't take too
(06:16):
much longer after the invention of the cylinder for various
folks to come up with flat recorded discs as an alternative,
so instead of a cylinder, you would just have a
flat disc with audio recorded on one and then eventually
both sides of the disc. These would ultimately become easier
(06:36):
to store and to produce than wax cylinders were. They
were originally made all of stuff like shell ac, which
is essentially something that you get from insects. But eventually
companies would make the shift to vinyl. While different music
companies battled it out over formats, we would mostly settle
(06:56):
on albums playing back at either forty five revolutions or
thirty three and a third revolutions per minent on turntables.
Some older albums would actually play it like seventy eight
revolutions per minuent. Now, the record album traces its history
back to the late nineteenth century. By the nineteen sixties,
you know, more than half a century later, vinyl albums
(07:20):
were the dominant form of recorded media for home use.
In fact, they were almost exclusively the media format for
home use unless you were really well off or maybe
you worked in the music industry or something, because then
you might have a real to real player. But otherwise
there just wasn't any call for that. So the music
(07:42):
industry had been relying upon real to reel players for
a while in order to make master recordings of performances,
as well as to edit and put together that master
in the first place. And this, of course is magnetic
tape we're talking about now. Magnetic tape also traces its
evolution back to the late nineteen teenth century, though at
that point we weren't yet talking about tape. So back
(08:05):
in the eighteen eighties, there was this feller named Oberlin Smith,
which what a name, What a great name, Oberlin Smith.
Oberlin reckoned that you could use magnetization to record sound
onto a magnetic medium, and it would have to obviously
be a medium that would respond to magnetic fields. So
(08:25):
his suggestion was using like silk thread that had been
coded in steel particles. And here's how he proposed such
a device would work. So first, for recording, you would
have a microphone. So sound goes into the microphone, like
speaking into the microphone, would then generate an alternating current.
I've done episodes about how microphones work, but essentially what
(08:49):
you're talking about is similar to what we were talking
about with recording with wax cylinders, except instead of the
membrane moving a needle to carve into wax, the vibrating
membrane would interact with an electromagnet and create a current,
a variable current. That current you could then use to
represent the sound. You could actually just send that current
(09:12):
to an amplifier and then to a speaker, a loud speaker,
and that's how you get microphone to loudspeaker amplified sound. Well,
in this case, you wouldn't be sending it to a loudspeaker. Instead,
you'd be using that current to go to an electromagnet
create a fluctuating magnetic field. And meanwhile, you would run
the steel dust coded string past this electromagnet, and that
(09:38):
fluctuating magnetic field would cause the particles on that string
to align a certain way according to whatever the magnetic
field was at the moment that the string was running
past it. And because that field is in flux, the
direction of those particles would vary over time, So the
string would actually become a record of the magnetic fluctuations
(10:03):
over time. And you know, obviously the rate at which
you pulled the string past this electromagnet would determine the
speed of recording. So to play it back, you would
put the string near a conductor essentially connected to some
sort of playback device like a speaker, with an amplifier
in between. Because the signal you're going to get is
(10:25):
going to be too weak to really drive a speaker.
So the magnetized particles on the string when you pull
it past a conductor, then you can induce current to
flow through that conductor, and that current, when amplified and
then sent to a speaker, would play back the recorded
sound used to create the record on the string in
(10:47):
the first place. Now, all Obey never build a working
model of his idea. However, a Danish inventor named Valdemar
Poulsen built upon this note. He either had read about
the previous concept or had come to the same conclusion independently.
(11:10):
It's not clear which is the case. But you know
Obey didn't build it. So Valdemar creates a patent for
a similar invention that he called the telegraphone, and he
got the patent. He was awarded the patent for this
invention in the late eighteen hundreds, and he landed essentially
(11:31):
a licensing deal here in America. He also landed other
deals elsewhere in the world. But in America he got
some folks to buy into it and they created the
American Telegraphone Company of Washington, DC. So that device used
like steel wire to record upon, but same sort of
(11:52):
basic idea. What you would run the steel wire past
a magnet that would magnetize the wire in various alignments,
and then running it back across a reader would play
back the recorded medium or media I should say. In
that case, well, the device didn't make that big of
an impact here in the United States. The utility was
(12:13):
somewhat limited, and the idea was that it really would
be more like a business equipment, right. It was meant
for things like taking notes, for dictation, that kind of thing.
The sound quality wasn't fantastic. It was not really intended
for pre recorded music. It wouldn't do well for that purpose.
(12:34):
The invention actually did a little bit better in Europe
than it did here in the United States. Here in
the US, the business didn't stay around for very long.
But other businesses that also took Polson's patent and licensed it,
they were able to create a business that stood the
test of time a bit better than the American version,
(12:55):
but let's get to the development of magnetic tape. So
this approach which showed that it was viable to use
magnetism as a recording medium or recording method, but the
steel wire just wasn't really the best approach. In the
mid nineteen twenties, there was an American named Joseph O'Neill
(13:16):
who theorized that you could quote quote a strip of
paper or some other cheap material end quote with magnetic
material for the purposes of recording audio to it, and
this would remove the need to use steel wire, or
steel coated threads, or steel tape. These all had limited utility.
With the case of thread, there was limited resilience, like
(13:39):
it could eventually break or fray. So he said, why
not just use a strip of material, coat it with
this magnetic stuff, and then use that for recording. However,
while he had suggested the concept, he didn't appear to
pursue this in any serious way as far as I
(13:59):
am aware, where he did not produce an actual example
of this. He just kind of theorized that it could
be done. Whereas a German engineer named Fritz Fleoimer had
developed a method to put metal stripes on cigarette paper
to want purpose. I do not know. I'm sure there
(14:19):
was a reason to put metal stripes on cigarette paper,
but I don't know what it was. But I didn't
look it up because I've got enough bunny trails going
on in this episode anyway. But he reasoned that because
he had figured out how to do that, how to
put metal stripes on cigarette paper, he could use a
similar approach to coat a strip of paper like paper tape,
(14:41):
with magnetic material, and then the paper tape could be
used as a recording medium for audio. The process of
recording and playback would be pretty similar as what it
was with the telegraphones, so not that different from steel
wire or steel tape. You would still have a right
head that would use a fluctuating magnetic fee to record
audio signals sent from a microphone to this magnetically coded
(15:06):
paper tape as it passed by underneath the right head,
and then later if you wanted to play it back,
a playback head. A red head would pick up the
magnetic stripe with its particles in various alignments, and this
would create the electric current that was created through induction,
and then that current would get amplified by an amplifier
(15:27):
and could then be sent as a signal to playback
sound on a loudspeaker. His work in the late nineteen
twenties would ultimately lead to the development of the Magnetophone
K one, which he unveiled in nineteen thirty five, which
was the first practical tape recorder. Okay, so that sets
the first stage for what would become the foundation for
(15:50):
the Walkman. When we come back, I'll talk a little
bit more about Walkman pre history, and we'll talk about
Sony itself and how it came about developing the Walkman
device and why it became one of the top fifty
most influential gadgets in history according to these folks in time.
But first, let's take a quick break. Okay. When we
(16:21):
left off, before the break, I was talking about Fritz Fleoimer,
a German engineer, an Austrian German engineer who developed this
magnetic tape that ultimately he would unveil in nineteen thirty five,
and that was the Magnetophone K one that was the
first practical tape recorder. But this was also during a
(16:45):
time where the world was heading into World War Two. Obviously,
World War two ends up being this massive conflict and
US forces were very much interested in one learning what
technology the Germans had access to and to stealing it.
(17:05):
Now that's not just the Americans. Everybody was like this,
right in. Any country that perceived that another country had a
technological advantage wanted to remove that advantage from their opponents,
wanted to be able to exploit it themselves. So this
was going on across all enemy lines, like everybody was
spying on and stealing from everyone else, even allies in
(17:29):
some cases. But here US forces were able to get
possession of some German recording equipment as well as some
German tapes, and soon Americans began developing their own version
of Floimer's technology. They began to create their own magnetic
tape systems and magnetic tapes themselves. By the late nineteen forties,
(17:49):
the recording industry had begun to use magnetic tape in
order for music production. Tape actually opened up a ton
of new opportunit unities. For one thing, you could record
several sessions to tape, and then you could physically cut
and edit the tape to put together a master recording.
(18:11):
You know, maybe you have some various takes that are
all pretty close to each other. But maybe take three
the band had a really great intro into the song.
It just sounded really good. But take five has the
best version of the bridge, and the group really nailed
(18:31):
the ending of the song just on the second take. Now,
before the days of magnetic tape, you pretty much had
to decide which of these takes was your favorite. And
it may not have all the best qualities of all
the best takes, but you're stuck with what you've got,
and so you got to pick whichever one is going
to be the master, and that's what you go with.
(18:52):
But with tape, with a really good editor, you could
actually put together a recording that doesn't really exist right
or at least it doesn't exist in one performance. It's
actually a combination of performances. You could do that if
you were really good with editing, and if the band
was really consistent, you could actually put this together. And
you could also do other things, like you could do
(19:14):
multi track recording. You could do overdubbing. That really opened
up a lot of opportunities. Overdubbing means you would record someone,
Let's say it's a vocalist singing, but it could just
as easily be a musician playing some instrument like guitar
or piano or whatever, and then you've got your recording.
Then you could play the recording back, and meanwhile the
(19:36):
vocalist or musician or whatever could play their own harmonies
along with the original recording, so they're accompanying themselves. They're
accompanying the recorded version of themself live. Then you could
record that. That's overdubbing. This way, you could layer your
recordings to get a more lush, rich sound than would
(19:57):
be possible if you were just relying on and you know,
a single artist or band or whatever. You could really
flesh sounds out that way. The tape machines in those
days were often these big, real to real devices, and
so it was not common for your average person to
get hold of one of those. I mean, they were
sold sometimes to consumers, but they were expensive and to
(20:21):
get the actual media was hard to There weren't a
lot of places selling real to real tape of performances.
So vinyl records were still the dominant form of recorded
media in the consumer space, but that would change thanks
to a Dutch electronics company called Phillips. Now the Phillips
Electronics Company dated back to eighteen ninety one sensing a
(20:44):
theme here, I'm sure like all these technologies and companies
date back to like the late nineteenth century, Brothers Anton
and Gerard Phillips created the Phillips Company in the Netherlands.
Their original focus was on light bulbs, and generally the
company's philosophy was that they would aim to create high
quality products, even though that meant that their products would
(21:06):
be priced for a fairly limited market, which is a
nice way of saying their stuff was expensive, you know. Now,
for a while, their company was part of a global
cartel that dominated the light bulb market, and on the
one hand, that did lead to forming certain standards in
the light bulb industry, but on the other it arguably
prevented competition in the marketplace. Anyway. By the late nineteen forties,
(21:29):
Phillips was starting to get into other types of technologies,
you know, like electric shavers, but they found out the
profit margins are razor thin. Not really, but I couldn't
resist the pun. But in the nineteen fifties, Phillips got
into the recording business. They launched a music label. They
later in the nineteen sixties acquired smaller record labels like
Mercury Records, and they were also thinking, well, how can
(21:52):
we also be in the business of the medium upon
which recorded music can go. So an engineer at Phillips
named lew Atten's worked out of an office in Belgium
where he was pioneering a new technology that would bring
magnetic tape media to home consumers. This was in nineteen
sixty two, and the invention that he pioneered was the
(22:13):
cassette tape. This tape would use a very thin strip
of plastic film coded in magnetic material. The film would
wrap around a pair of reels. Those reels would be
encased inside a plastic cartridge. On the outside of this
cartridge you would see like the two holes that'd be
the center of these two reels. They'd be pronged so
(22:34):
that they could fit onto a tape player's spokes, and
a small length of this tape is obviously uncovered. That
section could be then inserted into a tape recorder for
recording or playback. The cassette was such a small form
factor that immediately people saw advantages over larger reel to
reel machines that were far more bulky and expensive. Now,
(22:57):
the initial plan for the audio cassette was to sell
them as business tools like this was an idea like
again for dictation and taking notes and that kind of stuff.
It didn't take long, however, before Phillips and other companies said, hey,
what if we put pre recorded music on these and
sold them like we do with vinyl albums. Now you
(23:18):
might wonder what artist was the first to offer an
album on cassette tape. The answer to that is unclear.
Christian Romer has a blog post on legacybox dot com
about this and lists a few potential contenders for the
first album on cassette tape. One is Nina Simone's Wild
(23:40):
Is the Wind, Another is Johnny Mathis's The Shadow of
Your Smile. But my favorite is Eartha Kit's Love for
Sale album. I love Eartha Kit, what an amazing performer.
But as Romer points out, no one was really documenting
the history of albums on cassette when they first started
(24:02):
to become a thing, so it's unclear what the actual
answer is of who was first. I would also like
to point out that music labels likely produced more than
just one album on cassette at a time, because it
seems like an odd choice to just go with let's
just do one and see how it goes. Someone's album
obviously had to be the first off the manufacturing line,
but I think that's just splitting hairs. At that point,
(24:24):
cassettes were easier to store than vinyl albums, they took
up less space. They did have their own peculiarities. However,
if you brought a cassette tape near a strong magnet,
well you just screwed up the recording on your cassette
tape because the magnetic particles on the tape would realign
to this new powerful magnetic field, so effectively you would
(24:45):
erase your cassette. Anyone who had cassette tapes also knows
the pain of tape getting snagged on something and then
unreeling from inside the cassette. You would just have this
massive plastic film just unspooled from out side inside the cassette.
Now it's outside the cassette. So to fix that you
would have to do the old standby, which is what
(25:07):
I call inserting a pencil into the spokes on one
reel and gently coaxing the tape back into place by
twisting the pencil slowly, one twist at a time. What
a joy that was. But you know, while the cassette
media was far more portable than vinyl, the players weren't
that much more portable, at least not at first. I mean,
(25:29):
they were smaller than turntables, but they weren't pocket sized,
you know. Tape decks, like tape recorders, were still fairly large.
They were too large to carry around easily. Like you
could put a strap on one and wear it around
your neck like it was like a handbag or something,
but it was still pretty bulky. A lot of tape
(25:52):
decks did have headphone jacks, but not all of them,
because a lot of them had a built in speaker
in the tape deck itself, so you would just push
play and listened to the music coming straight out of
the tape deck. It's usually pretty tenny. It wasn't typically
a very good quality of sound, but it worked. But yeah,
it wasn't necessarily the case that a tape deck would
(26:12):
have a headphone jack. A lot of them did, but
it wasn't a sure thing. And that's kind of where
things sat for about a decade. But now let's flash
forward to the nineteen seventies in Japan. So the story
goes that one of Sony's co founders, a guy named
Masaru Ibuka, wanted to be able to listen to albums
(26:35):
on a portable playback device. Specifically, he wanted to be
able to listen to opera. He took lots of flights.
Being the head of a major electronics company in Japan,
he had to fly a lot, and he liked to
listen to opera, and he wanted a way to bring
opera albums with him on flights so that he wasn't
having to pay attention to everything else that's going on
(26:55):
on a plane. And he asked his engineers to look
into a way to achieve this goal, like how could
he listen to stuff on a device that was small
enough for him to easily bring it with him on
a flight. And a designer named Noria Oga got the
high pressure assignment of figuring out how to make something
(27:17):
that Ebuka would appreciate. So then Oga turns to a
product that Sony had already started producing at that point.
This was a product that they were producing for the
business market, and it was a small handheld tape recorder
called the TCM one hundred B. It was also known
as the Pressman because they were thinking that this would
(27:39):
be a device that reporters for newspapers would want to
use in order to make verbal notes. That kind of
thing did not digital, but recorded notes, and so it
was a handheld cassette recorder for voice memos and stuff.
It was small enough that you could hold it in
one hand. You would operate it by pressing the various buttons,
and they had buttons for stuff like rewind and fast
(28:00):
forward and record and play. All the basic functions of
your tape deck all built in. So the base elements
for a Walkman were already present in the Pressman. So
Oga just used the Pressman as kind of a launching pad,
and he created a prototype portable cassette player. He worked
with engineers to take the Pressman and tweak the design
(28:24):
of that product. So one thing they did was they
removed the recording feature, so it was purely a playback device,
not a recording device. They also changed it so that
the Pressman was monaural mono in other words, so you
didn't have two different channels of sound going to the
different speakers in your headset. It was all mono. They
(28:45):
changed it to stereo so it would be able to
support stereo recording. He then gave this prototype to Abuka
before Abuka was to go on another flight around the
world to do business e things in order to test
it out. And Abuka must have really liked the result,
because Sony would then go on to produce the Walkman
portable cassette player the following year, in nineteen seventy nine. Now,
(29:07):
this was never a sure thing. In fact, within the company,
there was a lot of resistance to this idea. There
were a lot of executives who said, I don't know
about this. I don't think there's actually a market big
enough to support the production and marketing of a portable
cassette player. But then Sony's other co founder, a guy
(29:28):
named Marita Akio, saw the potential for great success and
he said, no, Abuka was right, Like, this wasn't just
a project for Abuka so that he could listen to
music when he was on his flights. This thing could
be a real blockbuster hit for our company. So, with
the support of the co founders, the company did go
(29:49):
into the development for a consumer portable cassette player and
they began to develop the Walkman. All right, we're going
to take another quick break. When we come back, i'll
talk more about the Walkman story and its place in history. So,
(30:12):
with the support of Sony's co founder's engineers, that Sony
got to work in creating a consumer version of the
prototype that OGA had created for Ibuka, and they created
a device that had the designation TPSL two, but it
would get the name Walkman. Akio came up with that
(30:36):
name and said it should be called the Walkman because
you can walk around with it and listen to music. Pressman,
the voice recording device that was for the press. Walkman
is for walking around and listening to your music, and
they launched it in Japan in July nineteen seventy nine
for the equivalent of around one hundred and fifty dollars,
(30:59):
which is a big o' yikes, one hundred and fifty
dollars in nineteen seventy nine. The United States would not
get the Walkman until nineteen eighty. Meanwhile, you might wonder, okay,
one hundred and fifty bucks in nineteen seventy nine, what
would that be equivalent to today? Well, using a handy
dandy inflation calculator, that comes out to around six hundred
(31:22):
forty six dollars for a portable cassette player. Keep in
mind that the original Walkman didn't have recording capabilities. Just playback,
Holy cats, y'all. That is as incredibly expensive. Like again,
I always think about things like video game consoles that
launch for around five hundred to seven hundred dollars, and
people talk about how expensive that is. Keep in mind
(31:43):
that original Walkman would have set you back six hundred
forty six dollars, more than what some video game consoles
launch at. That's expensive. Now. When it did launch in
the United States, the original name for the device wasn't
the Walkman. It was the Soundabout which sounds about wrong
to me anyway. But eventually Sony would migrate back to
(32:06):
the Walkman, which was a Buka's suggestion from the get
Go and Occhio suggestion. The two of them argued that
it should have been that from the beginning. Interestingly, there
was a dispute about the origins of the Walkman concept
because there was another inventor who came up with a
(32:27):
very similar idea and in fact patented that idea in
nineteen seventy seven, two years before the Walkman came out. Now,
this inventor was Andreas Pavel, who had an invention that
he called the stereo belt, and as the name suggests,
(32:47):
the stereo belt was a belt that had audio equipment
attached to it, which included a battery pack as well
as audio players, and you would can headphones to this
belt in order to listen to it. So not exactly
the same thing as the Walkman, but the idea that
being a portable music playing device is what made it
(33:12):
similar to Walkman. Eventually, Pavel would bring lawsuits against Sony
in various regions, arguing that there was a patent infringement
going on that Sony had essentially copied the design that
Pavel had created without paying for it, without licensing it.
In several places, these complaints were ultimately dismissed. In other places,
(33:37):
Sony would settle out of court with Pavel rather than
have to go through the whole process of a legal proceedings,
which can be really expensive even if you win. So
while Sony never admitted any fault in this, they did
eventually pay a pretty hefty settlement out of court. Anyway,
(33:58):
back to the Walkman, so I mentioned earlier, the Walkmen
ran on a pair of double A batteries, which was great.
You know, their batteries weren't too expensive. You could take
them on the go, you didn't have to be tethered
to an outlet. They did require headphones because the Walkman
had no on board speaker. If you pushed play on
(34:19):
a Walkman and there were no headphones plugged into it,
all you would hear would be the gears turning as
the spokes were being rotated by the player itself. Sony
made around thirty thousand units initially in nineteen seventy nine
when they launched it in Japan, and sales were a
little slow in the beginning. However, Sony used some good
(34:41):
old fashioned elbow grease to get interest up in the product.
And by that I mean that Sony employees would literally
hit the streets in Japan with a Walkman and cassettes
and find people out there on the street and have
them listen to cassettes on the Walkmen and let them
have the experience of this portable music player. And it worked.
(35:03):
That marketing push really was effective. By August, just two
months after they launched, Sony had sold out of their
initial run of units. They were hoping for around like
five thousand units a month. Instead, they sold thirty thousand
and two months pretty incredible. Now, not everyone was super
happy about the Walkman and its success in the marketplace,
(35:25):
like it also saw great success here in the United
States once it came out in nineteen eighty, but not
everybody was really thrilled about this. There were people who
were warning that this technology was inspiring young folks to
shut themselves away from the world even while they were
walking around in the world, rather than being engaged in
(35:46):
the wholesome surroundings. Undoubtedly learning great moral lessons from their
wise elders, these hooligans would be listening to their Bob
Dylans and their Judas priests at even and their Smothers
brothers on headphones and blocking out the outside world and
allowing themselves to be shaped by the evil, wicked whims
(36:10):
of professional musicians. Oh the humanity. I'm making fun of it,
but the moral panic was real, right, There was moral
panic around portable cassette players. It just shows that fuddy
duddies will find moral panic in the oddest of places.
(36:30):
Heaven help you if you happen to also play dungeons
and dragons while listening to music on a Walkman, because
you were just destined for h double hockey sticks. Alan Bloom,
the author, said essentially as much in a book titled
The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom argued that young
people listening to personal music devices would eventually lead to
(36:52):
moral decay. Pretty crazy stuff. Sony would release many follow
ups to the original Walkmen, so there were lots of
improvements over the device over the following models. Some of
them were even smaller. Some of them would incorporate a
record function because people missed having that. The Walkmen would
(37:13):
also become almost synonymous with portable cassette players, kind of
like how the iPod would become almost synonymous with MP
three players. Folks would use the term Walkman even if
they were talking about a product from a competing company.
You know, it wasn't a portable cassette player. It was
a Walkman, even if it wasn't actually a Walkman, which
(37:33):
meant that Sony had to do a lot of work
to protect their trademark. Now, around the same time, you
had the fate of the cassette tape itself. So initially,
cassette sales were going very strong in the nineteen eighties,
but cassettes didn't totally replace vinyl records. For one thing,
you had music lovers who would call themselves audio files,
(37:56):
who would tend to prefer vinyl records over cassette tapes.
That cassettes could warp over time, you would get audio distortion,
you would get a hiss. There was a hiss associated
with audio cassettes, and therefore people who really valued the
experience of listening to music on high end equipment tended
(38:17):
to prefer vinyl to cassette tapes. However, the convenience of
cassette tapes plus the fact that you could purchase a
blank cassette and then record stuff to make your own tapes,
and thus giving birth to the cultural phenomenon of the mixtape.
Now making a mixtape that's an art form unto itself.
That meant that the cassette had a really firm foothold
(38:38):
and culture, and the incorporation of tape decks into car
entertainment systems helped too. This gets complicated by the introduction
of eight tracks, but that's a different matter. Anyway, it
appeared as though the party would never end. In nineteen
eighty four, Billboard reported that cassette tape sales were outpacing
vinyl LPs for the first time, and at that point
(38:59):
made up around fifty three percent of all albums shipped.
Now that shipped not necessarily sold, but still cassettes were
clearly making a lot of headway. They were easy to manufacture,
They again took up less space, You could sell a
whole lot more of them, You could get a lot
more in stock at a record store than you could
(39:20):
with vinyl, and yeah, people were digging them. However, the
introduction of the compact disc, which also was introduced in
the early nineteen eighties, would ultimately set the stage for
the cassette's decline. Now, it would take quite a few
years for compact discs to really establish themselves in the market,
particularly since early CD players were ridiculously expensive, like just
(39:46):
prohibitively expensive for most people. However, over time CDs would
start to catch on and cassette sales began to take
a turn, just as vinyl had done before it. In
nineteen ninety one, CD sales were higher, at least from
a dollar value, than cassette sales. So it doesn't mean
that there were more CDs sold, but more money was
(40:08):
made selling CDs than cassettes starting in nineteen ninety one.
So the nineties saw the decline of cassette sales continue
with more and more people switching to CDs. Vinyl became
an almost obsolete format for the general public. It never
fully went away, and of course it's enjoyed a resurgence
in more recent years, but in the nineties and early
(40:31):
two thousands it almost disappeared. Cassettes did enjoy a brief
little bit of a comeback. I mean, I guess arguably
it's still going now because some artists have released some
of their albums on cassette formats, including like Megan v.
Stallion and Taylor Swift, but it's not like a common thing.
(40:52):
Cassette sales in general were pretty low, and that also
meant that cassette players weren't really flying off store shelves either,
so it didn't make much sense to keep making them,
which brings us to our sad little tale coming to
a close here, because Sony actually did continue producing The
Walkman all the way through the nineteen nineties and all
(41:13):
through the first decade of the two thousands, despite the
plunge in cassette sales over that time period. But in
twenty ten, Sony threw in the towel and announced it
would shut down the portable cassette player line, so the
Walkman cassette player would be no more. They stopped production
in twenty ten. It however, was not the end of
(41:34):
the Walkman as a brand, because Sony gave the Walkman
brand to other products that were also in the music space.
They just weren't cassette players. So the main one would
be digital music players, digital audio players or DAPs, and
this is what I would often just call an MP
three player back in the old days. Like the Apple iPod,
(41:58):
Sony started introducing digital audio players way back in nineteen
ninety nine, which is actually two years before Apple would
introduce the iPod, But Sony's version initially only supported a
proprietary digital audio format called a track at r AC.
Sony had control over that file format and felt like
(42:18):
this would protect Sony's interests in the actual music production side.
In other words, this was a way to prevent piracy.
Sony specifically did not want to support file formats like
MP three. Now, the Walkmen would ultimately fall well behind
the iPod in sales in most countries. When it got
(42:41):
to digital audio players. The Walkman did okay in Japan,
but outside Japan it just it could not compete against
the iPod. However, you can still find digital audio players
that are branded as Walkman today, including high end players
that cost a whole bunch of money, like more than
one thousand dollars for some of these devices. I think
(43:04):
that's a pretty tall order when we live in a
world where smartphones have access to tons of music through
various music streaming platforms. Now, sure the fidelity isn't necessarily
top notch. You know, that depends on the streaming service,
the format they use, how much compression is used for
the files, and what kind of headphones or headset you're
(43:24):
using to listen to it. However, I think for the
majority of people out there, the convenience and accessibility that
is presented through smartphones that ends up being more important
than musical fidelity for most people, not everybody. Some folks
are more concerned with the quality of the experience. I
think that's legitimate. I think it's legit to really want
(43:45):
the absolute best quality of sound. However, that is also
a very subjective thing, right. You could have two people
and they could have the same taste in music, but
they might have very different perceptions of what set up
is best, and you can't you know, necessarily agree on
a common standard. The world of high fidelity audio is
(44:08):
filled with a lot of marketing that strikes me as
being just a stone's throw away from pure pseudoscience. But
I've talked about that before, so I'll leave it for now.
So the cassette Walkman has been out of production since
twenty ten. The brand still exists for digital audio players,
and some artists do continue to put stuff out on
(44:28):
cassette because nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Personally,
I do miss the days of putting together the perfect mixtape.
There's something really special about getting one just right, like
finding that right progress of songs so that you know
you've got like the really high energy number comes in
at song number three, and then you've got a cool
(44:48):
down number for song number four. That kind of thing.
Making a curative playlist doesn't really scratch the same itch
for me. There's something really tactle about using cassette tapes
and creating a mix tape that way, and slapping a
really good mixtape into a portable music player and then
just going for a walk is a pleasure that I
think people should really seek out if they're able to
(45:10):
that kind of thing is just one of the simple
pleasures of life if it's accessible to you. I hope
that this episode was interesting to all of y'all. I
hope you're doing well, and I will talk to you
again really soon.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
For tech Stuff, I'm Cara Price. Kyle Murdoch wrote our
theme song. Join us next Wednesday for Textuff the Story,
when we will share an in depth conversation with the
co founder and CEO of Roadblocks, David Bizuki. If there
are children in your life, you'll definitely want to check
this one out. Please rate, review, and reach out to
us at Textuff Podcast at gmail dot com.
Ask Hey, it's Cara Price, host of tech Stuff. We're
taking a week off, but we'll have fresh episodes for
you next Wednesday. You won't want to miss Oz's conversation
with the co founder and CEO of Roadblocks. If you've
always wondered what draws ninety five million people to a
gaming platform, definitely check out their conversation next week. In
(00:30):
lieu of the headlines today, we wanted to share an
episode of tech Stuff from September twenty twenty four about
what makes the Sony Walkman one of the most influential
gadgets of all time. In the episode you're about to hear,
Jonathan Strickland tells us how the Walkman came to be
and about its lasting impact on how we experience music.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Take a listen. Welcome to tech Stuff, production from iHeartRadio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
(01:09):
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and
how the tech are you So? Back in twenty sixteen,
an actual a group of writers writing for Time magazine
or at least Time dot Com, assembled a list of
what they called the fifty most influential gadgets of all time.
(01:31):
They said that the list was quote ordered by influence
end quote, and maybe that's the case. I do find
it a little hard to swallow because number fifty on
their list, as in the bottom of the list, was
the Apple iPhone. Now, y'all, I am not the biggest
fan of Apple. I don't own an iPhone, but I
(01:54):
think if I were to make a list of most
influential gadgets of all time, the iPhone would be way
higher up on that list than the very bottom. You know,
the iPhone really ushered in the era of the consumer smartphone.
It was not the first smartphone. Apple rarely ever brings
a product to market as the first of its kind.
(02:15):
They bring refined products to the market, and it was
the first smartphone to see huge success with a mainstream audience,
not just you know, executives on the go or executives
who wanted to have a technological status symbol. Plus, I mean,
the entire nature of the web changed due to a
(02:36):
shift toward mobile computing, and I think we have to
lay that largely at the feet of the Apple iPhone.
While the iPhone is not the most popular smartphone in
the world, I think that it's really what got the
trend moving toward mobile computing, and that in turn changed
(02:57):
really like the entire web. So I would put it
higher on the list. Then my guess is that making
a list of the fifty most influential gadgets is hard.
And anyway, today's episode is not about the iPhone at all.
It's just this was the article that kind of launched
me into where I wanted to go today. So instead
of talking about number fifty, because I've done episodes about
the iPhone before, I thought we would talk about number
(03:19):
forty seven on this list. So this is more influential
than the iPhone according to that group of writers, and
it's the Sony Walkman, as in the portable cassette player.
It's still not very high up on the list, but
you know, what can you do? So the Walkman created
the chance for folks to experience pre recorded audio in
(03:41):
a pretty new way, a way that was portable, and
it let them create a kind of bubble around themselves
even if they were walking around in public. And it
meant you weren't tethered to like a wall outlet or
lugging around a large tape deck or tape recorder, so
that you could listen to your pre recorded cassettes. You
could just PLoP in some batteries, a pair of double
(04:04):
A batteries into this thing. You put in your favorite
audio cassette, You plug in your headphones, put them on
your ears, you push play, you head out into the world.
I think it's easy for us to take for granted
how portable the music experience is today. You know, the
fact that we had MP three players, iPods, and then
smartphones and streaming services and all that that's transformed the
(04:27):
way we experience music in large part, but once upon
a time that wasn't so much of an option. So
let's turn back the clock and learn about the development,
the release, and the impact of the Sony Walkman. And
before we get to that, we have to have some preamble,
because you know, this is tech stuff. You know tech stuff.
I like to talk about the history of technologies, and
(04:48):
not just the technology, but the stuff that led to
the development of that tech. So let's talk about recorded
media and the development of the cassette tape medium. Now
I've done full episodes about the en of recorded media.
How one of the earliest versions was recording sound to
cylinders that were coated in wax. Recording to a wax
(05:10):
cylinder essentially involved shouting into an acoustic horn, and that
acoustic horn at the narrow end had a little membrane
that was connected to a needle, and the membrane would
vibrate when sound waves would come into the horn. The
needle that vibrates would carve into the wax on the cylinder.
(05:31):
The cylinder would be turned and the needle would start
to carve a spiral into the cylinder. You could take
the carved cylinder and put that into a player, which
essentially did the same process, but in reverse. You would
put a stylist like another needle, and fit it into
the groove in the cylinder. You would begin to rotate
(05:53):
the cylinder. The needle would travel through the groove and
it would vibrate as it did so, which would cause
a memor brain to vibrate at the narrow end of
an acoustic horn, And if you listened real carefully at
the wide end of the acoustic horn, you would be
able to hear the recorded sound, the playback of whatever
sound had been recorded originally. Now, it didn't take too
(06:16):
much longer after the invention of the cylinder for various
folks to come up with flat recorded discs as an alternative,
so instead of a cylinder, you would just have a
flat disc with audio recorded on one and then eventually
both sides of the disc. These would ultimately become easier
(06:36):
to store and to produce than wax cylinders were. They
were originally made all of stuff like shell ac, which
is essentially something that you get from insects. But eventually
companies would make the shift to vinyl. While different music
companies battled it out over formats, we would mostly settle
(06:56):
on albums playing back at either forty five revolutions or
thirty three and a third revolutions per minent on turntables.
Some older albums would actually play it like seventy eight
revolutions per minuent. Now, the record album traces its history
back to the late nineteenth century. By the nineteen sixties,
you know, more than half a century later, vinyl albums
(07:20):
were the dominant form of recorded media for home use.
In fact, they were almost exclusively the media format for
home use unless you were really well off or maybe
you worked in the music industry or something, because then
you might have a real to real player. But otherwise
there just wasn't any call for that. So the music
(07:42):
industry had been relying upon real to reel players for
a while in order to make master recordings of performances,
as well as to edit and put together that master
in the first place. And this, of course is magnetic
tape we're talking about now. Magnetic tape also traces its
evolution back to the late nineteen teenth century, though at
that point we weren't yet talking about tape. So back
(08:05):
in the eighteen eighties, there was this feller named Oberlin Smith,
which what a name, What a great name, Oberlin Smith.
Oberlin reckoned that you could use magnetization to record sound
onto a magnetic medium, and it would have to obviously
be a medium that would respond to magnetic fields. So
(08:25):
his suggestion was using like silk thread that had been
coded in steel particles. And here's how he proposed such
a device would work. So first, for recording, you would
have a microphone. So sound goes into the microphone, like
speaking into the microphone, would then generate an alternating current.
I've done episodes about how microphones work, but essentially what
(08:49):
you're talking about is similar to what we were talking
about with recording with wax cylinders, except instead of the
membrane moving a needle to carve into wax, the vibrating
membrane would interact with an electromagnet and create a current,
a variable current. That current you could then use to
represent the sound. You could actually just send that current
(09:12):
to an amplifier and then to a speaker, a loud speaker,
and that's how you get microphone to loudspeaker amplified sound. Well,
in this case, you wouldn't be sending it to a loudspeaker. Instead,
you'd be using that current to go to an electromagnet
create a fluctuating magnetic field. And meanwhile, you would run
the steel dust coded string past this electromagnet, and that
(09:38):
fluctuating magnetic field would cause the particles on that string
to align a certain way according to whatever the magnetic
field was at the moment that the string was running
past it. And because that field is in flux, the
direction of those particles would vary over time, So the
string would actually become a record of the magnetic fluctuations
(10:03):
over time. And you know, obviously the rate at which
you pulled the string past this electromagnet would determine the
speed of recording. So to play it back, you would
put the string near a conductor essentially connected to some
sort of playback device like a speaker, with an amplifier
in between. Because the signal you're going to get is
(10:25):
going to be too weak to really drive a speaker.
So the magnetized particles on the string when you pull
it past a conductor, then you can induce current to
flow through that conductor, and that current, when amplified and
then sent to a speaker, would play back the recorded
sound used to create the record on the string in
(10:47):
the first place. Now, all Obey never build a working
model of his idea. However, a Danish inventor named Valdemar
Poulsen built upon this note. He either had read about
the previous concept or had come to the same conclusion independently.
(11:10):
It's not clear which is the case. But you know
Obey didn't build it. So Valdemar creates a patent for
a similar invention that he called the telegraphone, and he
got the patent. He was awarded the patent for this
invention in the late eighteen hundreds, and he landed essentially
(11:31):
a licensing deal here in America. He also landed other
deals elsewhere in the world. But in America he got
some folks to buy into it and they created the
American Telegraphone Company of Washington, DC. So that device used
like steel wire to record upon, but same sort of
(11:52):
basic idea. What you would run the steel wire past
a magnet that would magnetize the wire in various alignments,
and then running it back across a reader would play
back the recorded medium or media I should say. In
that case, well, the device didn't make that big of
an impact here in the United States. The utility was
(12:13):
somewhat limited, and the idea was that it really would
be more like a business equipment, right. It was meant
for things like taking notes, for dictation, that kind of thing.
The sound quality wasn't fantastic. It was not really intended
for pre recorded music. It wouldn't do well for that purpose.
(12:34):
The invention actually did a little bit better in Europe
than it did here in the United States. Here in
the US, the business didn't stay around for very long.
But other businesses that also took Polson's patent and licensed it,
they were able to create a business that stood the
test of time a bit better than the American version,
(12:55):
but let's get to the development of magnetic tape. So
this approach which showed that it was viable to use
magnetism as a recording medium or recording method, but the
steel wire just wasn't really the best approach. In the
mid nineteen twenties, there was an American named Joseph O'Neill
(13:16):
who theorized that you could quote quote a strip of
paper or some other cheap material end quote with magnetic
material for the purposes of recording audio to it, and
this would remove the need to use steel wire, or
steel coated threads, or steel tape. These all had limited utility.
With the case of thread, there was limited resilience, like
(13:39):
it could eventually break or fray. So he said, why
not just use a strip of material, coat it with
this magnetic stuff, and then use that for recording. However,
while he had suggested the concept, he didn't appear to
pursue this in any serious way as far as I
(13:59):
am aware, where he did not produce an actual example
of this. He just kind of theorized that it could
be done. Whereas a German engineer named Fritz Fleoimer had
developed a method to put metal stripes on cigarette paper
to want purpose. I do not know. I'm sure there
(14:19):
was a reason to put metal stripes on cigarette paper,
but I don't know what it was. But I didn't
look it up because I've got enough bunny trails going
on in this episode anyway. But he reasoned that because
he had figured out how to do that, how to
put metal stripes on cigarette paper, he could use a
similar approach to coat a strip of paper like paper tape,
(14:41):
with magnetic material, and then the paper tape could be
used as a recording medium for audio. The process of
recording and playback would be pretty similar as what it
was with the telegraphones, so not that different from steel
wire or steel tape. You would still have a right
head that would use a fluctuating magnetic fee to record
audio signals sent from a microphone to this magnetically coded
(15:06):
paper tape as it passed by underneath the right head,
and then later if you wanted to play it back,
a playback head. A red head would pick up the
magnetic stripe with its particles in various alignments, and this
would create the electric current that was created through induction,
and then that current would get amplified by an amplifier
(15:27):
and could then be sent as a signal to playback
sound on a loudspeaker. His work in the late nineteen
twenties would ultimately lead to the development of the Magnetophone
K one, which he unveiled in nineteen thirty five, which
was the first practical tape recorder. Okay, so that sets
the first stage for what would become the foundation for
(15:50):
the Walkman. When we come back, I'll talk a little
bit more about Walkman pre history, and we'll talk about
Sony itself and how it came about developing the Walkman
device and why it became one of the top fifty
most influential gadgets in history according to these folks in time.
But first, let's take a quick break. Okay. When we
(16:21):
left off, before the break, I was talking about Fritz Fleoimer,
a German engineer, an Austrian German engineer who developed this
magnetic tape that ultimately he would unveil in nineteen thirty five,
and that was the Magnetophone K one that was the
first practical tape recorder. But this was also during a
(16:45):
time where the world was heading into World War Two. Obviously,
World War two ends up being this massive conflict and
US forces were very much interested in one learning what
technology the Germans had access to and to stealing it.
(17:05):
Now that's not just the Americans. Everybody was like this,
right in. Any country that perceived that another country had a
technological advantage wanted to remove that advantage from their opponents,
wanted to be able to exploit it themselves. So this
was going on across all enemy lines, like everybody was
spying on and stealing from everyone else, even allies in
(17:29):
some cases. But here US forces were able to get
possession of some German recording equipment as well as some
German tapes, and soon Americans began developing their own version
of Floimer's technology. They began to create their own magnetic
tape systems and magnetic tapes themselves. By the late nineteen forties,
(17:49):
the recording industry had begun to use magnetic tape in
order for music production. Tape actually opened up a ton
of new opportunit unities. For one thing, you could record
several sessions to tape, and then you could physically cut
and edit the tape to put together a master recording.
(18:11):
You know, maybe you have some various takes that are
all pretty close to each other. But maybe take three
the band had a really great intro into the song.
It just sounded really good. But take five has the
best version of the bridge, and the group really nailed
(18:31):
the ending of the song just on the second take. Now,
before the days of magnetic tape, you pretty much had
to decide which of these takes was your favorite. And
it may not have all the best qualities of all
the best takes, but you're stuck with what you've got,
and so you got to pick whichever one is going
to be the master, and that's what you go with.
(18:52):
But with tape, with a really good editor, you could
actually put together a recording that doesn't really exist right
or at least it doesn't exist in one performance. It's
actually a combination of performances. You could do that if
you were really good with editing, and if the band
was really consistent, you could actually put this together. And
you could also do other things, like you could do
(19:14):
multi track recording. You could do overdubbing. That really opened
up a lot of opportunities. Overdubbing means you would record someone,
Let's say it's a vocalist singing, but it could just
as easily be a musician playing some instrument like guitar
or piano or whatever, and then you've got your recording.
Then you could play the recording back, and meanwhile the
(19:36):
vocalist or musician or whatever could play their own harmonies
along with the original recording, so they're accompanying themselves. They're
accompanying the recorded version of themself live. Then you could
record that. That's overdubbing. This way, you could layer your
recordings to get a more lush, rich sound than would
(19:57):
be possible if you were just relying on and you know,
a single artist or band or whatever. You could really
flesh sounds out that way. The tape machines in those
days were often these big, real to real devices, and
so it was not common for your average person to
get hold of one of those. I mean, they were
sold sometimes to consumers, but they were expensive and to
(20:21):
get the actual media was hard to There weren't a
lot of places selling real to real tape of performances.
So vinyl records were still the dominant form of recorded
media in the consumer space, but that would change thanks
to a Dutch electronics company called Phillips. Now the Phillips
Electronics Company dated back to eighteen ninety one sensing a
(20:44):
theme here, I'm sure like all these technologies and companies
date back to like the late nineteenth century, Brothers Anton
and Gerard Phillips created the Phillips Company in the Netherlands.
Their original focus was on light bulbs, and generally the
company's philosophy was that they would aim to create high
quality products, even though that meant that their products would
(21:06):
be priced for a fairly limited market, which is a
nice way of saying their stuff was expensive, you know. Now,
for a while, their company was part of a global
cartel that dominated the light bulb market, and on the
one hand, that did lead to forming certain standards in
the light bulb industry, but on the other it arguably
prevented competition in the marketplace. Anyway. By the late nineteen forties,
(21:29):
Phillips was starting to get into other types of technologies,
you know, like electric shavers, but they found out the
profit margins are razor thin. Not really, but I couldn't
resist the pun. But in the nineteen fifties, Phillips got
into the recording business. They launched a music label. They
later in the nineteen sixties acquired smaller record labels like
Mercury Records, and they were also thinking, well, how can
(21:52):
we also be in the business of the medium upon
which recorded music can go. So an engineer at Phillips
named lew Atten's worked out of an office in Belgium
where he was pioneering a new technology that would bring
magnetic tape media to home consumers. This was in nineteen
sixty two, and the invention that he pioneered was the
(22:13):
cassette tape. This tape would use a very thin strip
of plastic film coded in magnetic material. The film would
wrap around a pair of reels. Those reels would be
encased inside a plastic cartridge. On the outside of this
cartridge you would see like the two holes that'd be
the center of these two reels. They'd be pronged so
(22:34):
that they could fit onto a tape player's spokes, and
a small length of this tape is obviously uncovered. That
section could be then inserted into a tape recorder for
recording or playback. The cassette was such a small form
factor that immediately people saw advantages over larger reel to
reel machines that were far more bulky and expensive. Now,
(22:57):
the initial plan for the audio cassette was to sell
them as business tools like this was an idea like
again for dictation and taking notes and that kind of stuff.
It didn't take long, however, before Phillips and other companies said, hey,
what if we put pre recorded music on these and
sold them like we do with vinyl albums. Now you
(23:18):
might wonder what artist was the first to offer an
album on cassette tape. The answer to that is unclear.
Christian Romer has a blog post on legacybox dot com
about this and lists a few potential contenders for the
first album on cassette tape. One is Nina Simone's Wild
(23:40):
Is the Wind, Another is Johnny Mathis's The Shadow of
Your Smile. But my favorite is Eartha Kit's Love for
Sale album. I love Eartha Kit, what an amazing performer.
But as Romer points out, no one was really documenting
the history of albums on cassette when they first started
(24:02):
to become a thing, so it's unclear what the actual
answer is of who was first. I would also like
to point out that music labels likely produced more than
just one album on cassette at a time, because it
seems like an odd choice to just go with let's
just do one and see how it goes. Someone's album
obviously had to be the first off the manufacturing line,
but I think that's just splitting hairs. At that point,
(24:24):
cassettes were easier to store than vinyl albums, they took
up less space. They did have their own peculiarities. However,
if you brought a cassette tape near a strong magnet,
well you just screwed up the recording on your cassette
tape because the magnetic particles on the tape would realign
to this new powerful magnetic field, so effectively you would
(24:45):
erase your cassette. Anyone who had cassette tapes also knows
the pain of tape getting snagged on something and then
unreeling from inside the cassette. You would just have this
massive plastic film just unspooled from out side inside the cassette.
Now it's outside the cassette. So to fix that you
would have to do the old standby, which is what
(25:07):
I call inserting a pencil into the spokes on one
reel and gently coaxing the tape back into place by
twisting the pencil slowly, one twist at a time. What
a joy that was. But you know, while the cassette
media was far more portable than vinyl, the players weren't
that much more portable, at least not at first. I mean,
(25:29):
they were smaller than turntables, but they weren't pocket sized,
you know. Tape decks, like tape recorders, were still fairly large.
They were too large to carry around easily. Like you
could put a strap on one and wear it around
your neck like it was like a handbag or something,
but it was still pretty bulky. A lot of tape
(25:52):
decks did have headphone jacks, but not all of them,
because a lot of them had a built in speaker
in the tape deck itself, so you would just push
play and listened to the music coming straight out of
the tape deck. It's usually pretty tenny. It wasn't typically
a very good quality of sound, but it worked. But yeah,
it wasn't necessarily the case that a tape deck would
(26:12):
have a headphone jack. A lot of them did, but
it wasn't a sure thing. And that's kind of where
things sat for about a decade. But now let's flash
forward to the nineteen seventies in Japan. So the story
goes that one of Sony's co founders, a guy named
Masaru Ibuka, wanted to be able to listen to albums
(26:35):
on a portable playback device. Specifically, he wanted to be
able to listen to opera. He took lots of flights.
Being the head of a major electronics company in Japan,
he had to fly a lot, and he liked to
listen to opera, and he wanted a way to bring
opera albums with him on flights so that he wasn't
having to pay attention to everything else that's going on
(26:55):
on a plane. And he asked his engineers to look
into a way to achieve this goal, like how could
he listen to stuff on a device that was small
enough for him to easily bring it with him on
a flight. And a designer named Noria Oga got the
high pressure assignment of figuring out how to make something
(27:17):
that Ebuka would appreciate. So then Oga turns to a
product that Sony had already started producing at that point.
This was a product that they were producing for the
business market, and it was a small handheld tape recorder
called the TCM one hundred B. It was also known
as the Pressman because they were thinking that this would
(27:39):
be a device that reporters for newspapers would want to
use in order to make verbal notes. That kind of
thing did not digital, but recorded notes, and so it
was a handheld cassette recorder for voice memos and stuff.
It was small enough that you could hold it in
one hand. You would operate it by pressing the various buttons,
and they had buttons for stuff like rewind and fast
(28:00):
forward and record and play. All the basic functions of
your tape deck all built in. So the base elements
for a Walkman were already present in the Pressman. So
Oga just used the Pressman as kind of a launching pad,
and he created a prototype portable cassette player. He worked
with engineers to take the Pressman and tweak the design
(28:24):
of that product. So one thing they did was they
removed the recording feature, so it was purely a playback device,
not a recording device. They also changed it so that
the Pressman was monaural mono in other words, so you
didn't have two different channels of sound going to the
different speakers in your headset. It was all mono. They
(28:45):
changed it to stereo so it would be able to
support stereo recording. He then gave this prototype to Abuka
before Abuka was to go on another flight around the
world to do business e things in order to test
it out. And Abuka must have really liked the result,
because Sony would then go on to produce the Walkman
portable cassette player the following year, in nineteen seventy nine. Now,
(29:07):
this was never a sure thing. In fact, within the company,
there was a lot of resistance to this idea. There
were a lot of executives who said, I don't know
about this. I don't think there's actually a market big
enough to support the production and marketing of a portable
cassette player. But then Sony's other co founder, a guy
(29:28):
named Marita Akio, saw the potential for great success and
he said, no, Abuka was right, Like, this wasn't just
a project for Abuka so that he could listen to
music when he was on his flights. This thing could
be a real blockbuster hit for our company. So, with
the support of the co founders, the company did go
(29:49):
into the development for a consumer portable cassette player and
they began to develop the Walkman. All right, we're going
to take another quick break. When we come back, i'll
talk more about the Walkman story and its place in history. So,
(30:12):
with the support of Sony's co founder's engineers, that Sony
got to work in creating a consumer version of the
prototype that OGA had created for Ibuka, and they created
a device that had the designation TPSL two, but it
would get the name Walkman. Akio came up with that
(30:36):
name and said it should be called the Walkman because
you can walk around with it and listen to music. Pressman,
the voice recording device that was for the press. Walkman
is for walking around and listening to your music, and
they launched it in Japan in July nineteen seventy nine
for the equivalent of around one hundred and fifty dollars,
(30:59):
which is a big o' yikes, one hundred and fifty
dollars in nineteen seventy nine. The United States would not
get the Walkman until nineteen eighty. Meanwhile, you might wonder, okay,
one hundred and fifty bucks in nineteen seventy nine, what
would that be equivalent to today? Well, using a handy
dandy inflation calculator, that comes out to around six hundred
(31:22):
forty six dollars for a portable cassette player. Keep in
mind that the original Walkman didn't have recording capabilities. Just playback,
Holy cats, y'all. That is as incredibly expensive. Like again,
I always think about things like video game consoles that
launch for around five hundred to seven hundred dollars, and
people talk about how expensive that is. Keep in mind
(31:43):
that original Walkman would have set you back six hundred
forty six dollars, more than what some video game consoles
launch at. That's expensive. Now. When it did launch in
the United States, the original name for the device wasn't
the Walkman. It was the Soundabout which sounds about wrong
to me anyway. But eventually Sony would migrate back to
(32:06):
the Walkman, which was a Buka's suggestion from the get
Go and Occhio suggestion. The two of them argued that
it should have been that from the beginning. Interestingly, there
was a dispute about the origins of the Walkman concept
because there was another inventor who came up with a
(32:27):
very similar idea and in fact patented that idea in
nineteen seventy seven, two years before the Walkman came out. Now,
this inventor was Andreas Pavel, who had an invention that
he called the stereo belt, and as the name suggests,
(32:47):
the stereo belt was a belt that had audio equipment
attached to it, which included a battery pack as well
as audio players, and you would can headphones to this
belt in order to listen to it. So not exactly
the same thing as the Walkman, but the idea that
being a portable music playing device is what made it
(33:12):
similar to Walkman. Eventually, Pavel would bring lawsuits against Sony
in various regions, arguing that there was a patent infringement
going on that Sony had essentially copied the design that
Pavel had created without paying for it, without licensing it.
In several places, these complaints were ultimately dismissed. In other places,
(33:37):
Sony would settle out of court with Pavel rather than
have to go through the whole process of a legal proceedings,
which can be really expensive even if you win. So
while Sony never admitted any fault in this, they did
eventually pay a pretty hefty settlement out of court. Anyway,
(33:58):
back to the Walkman, so I mentioned earlier, the Walkmen
ran on a pair of double A batteries, which was great.
You know, their batteries weren't too expensive. You could take
them on the go, you didn't have to be tethered
to an outlet. They did require headphones because the Walkman
had no on board speaker. If you pushed play on
(34:19):
a Walkman and there were no headphones plugged into it,
all you would hear would be the gears turning as
the spokes were being rotated by the player itself. Sony
made around thirty thousand units initially in nineteen seventy nine
when they launched it in Japan, and sales were a
little slow in the beginning. However, Sony used some good
(34:41):
old fashioned elbow grease to get interest up in the product.
And by that I mean that Sony employees would literally
hit the streets in Japan with a Walkman and cassettes
and find people out there on the street and have
them listen to cassettes on the Walkmen and let them
have the experience of this portable music player. And it worked.
(35:03):
That marketing push really was effective. By August, just two
months after they launched, Sony had sold out of their
initial run of units. They were hoping for around like
five thousand units a month. Instead, they sold thirty thousand
and two months pretty incredible. Now, not everyone was super
happy about the Walkman and its success in the marketplace,
(35:25):
like it also saw great success here in the United
States once it came out in nineteen eighty, but not
everybody was really thrilled about this. There were people who
were warning that this technology was inspiring young folks to
shut themselves away from the world even while they were
walking around in the world, rather than being engaged in
(35:46):
the wholesome surroundings. Undoubtedly learning great moral lessons from their
wise elders, these hooligans would be listening to their Bob
Dylans and their Judas priests at even and their Smothers
brothers on headphones and blocking out the outside world and
allowing themselves to be shaped by the evil, wicked whims
(36:10):
of professional musicians. Oh the humanity. I'm making fun of it,
but the moral panic was real, right, There was moral
panic around portable cassette players. It just shows that fuddy
duddies will find moral panic in the oddest of places.
(36:30):
Heaven help you if you happen to also play dungeons
and dragons while listening to music on a Walkman, because
you were just destined for h double hockey sticks. Alan Bloom,
the author, said essentially as much in a book titled
The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom argued that young
people listening to personal music devices would eventually lead to
(36:52):
moral decay. Pretty crazy stuff. Sony would release many follow
ups to the original Walkmen, so there were lots of
improvements over the device over the following models. Some of
them were even smaller. Some of them would incorporate a
record function because people missed having that. The Walkmen would
(37:13):
also become almost synonymous with portable cassette players, kind of
like how the iPod would become almost synonymous with MP
three players. Folks would use the term Walkman even if
they were talking about a product from a competing company.
You know, it wasn't a portable cassette player. It was
a Walkman, even if it wasn't actually a Walkman, which
(37:33):
meant that Sony had to do a lot of work
to protect their trademark. Now, around the same time, you
had the fate of the cassette tape itself. So initially,
cassette sales were going very strong in the nineteen eighties,
but cassettes didn't totally replace vinyl records. For one thing,
you had music lovers who would call themselves audio files,
(37:56):
who would tend to prefer vinyl records over cassette tapes.
That cassettes could warp over time, you would get audio distortion,
you would get a hiss. There was a hiss associated
with audio cassettes, and therefore people who really valued the
experience of listening to music on high end equipment tended
(38:17):
to prefer vinyl to cassette tapes. However, the convenience of
cassette tapes plus the fact that you could purchase a
blank cassette and then record stuff to make your own tapes,
and thus giving birth to the cultural phenomenon of the mixtape.
Now making a mixtape that's an art form unto itself.
That meant that the cassette had a really firm foothold
(38:38):
and culture, and the incorporation of tape decks into car
entertainment systems helped too. This gets complicated by the introduction
of eight tracks, but that's a different matter. Anyway, it
appeared as though the party would never end. In nineteen
eighty four, Billboard reported that cassette tape sales were outpacing
vinyl LPs for the first time, and at that point
(38:59):
made up around fifty three percent of all albums shipped.
Now that shipped not necessarily sold, but still cassettes were
clearly making a lot of headway. They were easy to manufacture,
They again took up less space, You could sell a
whole lot more of them, You could get a lot
more in stock at a record store than you could
(39:20):
with vinyl, and yeah, people were digging them. However, the
introduction of the compact disc, which also was introduced in
the early nineteen eighties, would ultimately set the stage for
the cassette's decline. Now, it would take quite a few
years for compact discs to really establish themselves in the market,
particularly since early CD players were ridiculously expensive, like just
(39:46):
prohibitively expensive for most people. However, over time CDs would
start to catch on and cassette sales began to take
a turn, just as vinyl had done before it. In
nineteen ninety one, CD sales were higher, at least from
a dollar value, than cassette sales. So it doesn't mean
that there were more CDs sold, but more money was
(40:08):
made selling CDs than cassettes starting in nineteen ninety one.
So the nineties saw the decline of cassette sales continue
with more and more people switching to CDs. Vinyl became
an almost obsolete format for the general public. It never
fully went away, and of course it's enjoyed a resurgence
in more recent years, but in the nineties and early
(40:31):
two thousands it almost disappeared. Cassettes did enjoy a brief
little bit of a comeback. I mean, I guess arguably
it's still going now because some artists have released some
of their albums on cassette formats, including like Megan v.
Stallion and Taylor Swift, but it's not like a common thing.
(40:52):
Cassette sales in general were pretty low, and that also
meant that cassette players weren't really flying off store shelves either,
so it didn't make much sense to keep making them,
which brings us to our sad little tale coming to
a close here, because Sony actually did continue producing The
Walkman all the way through the nineteen nineties and all
(41:13):
through the first decade of the two thousands, despite the
plunge in cassette sales over that time period. But in
twenty ten, Sony threw in the towel and announced it
would shut down the portable cassette player line, so the
Walkman cassette player would be no more. They stopped production
in twenty ten. It however, was not the end of
(41:34):
the Walkman as a brand, because Sony gave the Walkman
brand to other products that were also in the music space.
They just weren't cassette players. So the main one would
be digital music players, digital audio players or DAPs, and
this is what I would often just call an MP
three player back in the old days. Like the Apple iPod,
(41:58):
Sony started introducing digital audio players way back in nineteen
ninety nine, which is actually two years before Apple would
introduce the iPod, But Sony's version initially only supported a
proprietary digital audio format called a track at r AC.
Sony had control over that file format and felt like
(42:18):
this would protect Sony's interests in the actual music production side.
In other words, this was a way to prevent piracy.
Sony specifically did not want to support file formats like
MP three. Now, the Walkmen would ultimately fall well behind
the iPod in sales in most countries. When it got
(42:41):
to digital audio players. The Walkman did okay in Japan,
but outside Japan it just it could not compete against
the iPod. However, you can still find digital audio players
that are branded as Walkman today, including high end players
that cost a whole bunch of money, like more than
one thousand dollars for some of these devices. I think
(43:04):
that's a pretty tall order when we live in a
world where smartphones have access to tons of music through
various music streaming platforms. Now, sure the fidelity isn't necessarily
top notch. You know, that depends on the streaming service,
the format they use, how much compression is used for
the files, and what kind of headphones or headset you're
(43:24):
using to listen to it. However, I think for the
majority of people out there, the convenience and accessibility that
is presented through smartphones that ends up being more important
than musical fidelity for most people, not everybody. Some folks
are more concerned with the quality of the experience. I
think that's legitimate. I think it's legit to really want
(43:45):
the absolute best quality of sound. However, that is also
a very subjective thing, right. You could have two people
and they could have the same taste in music, but
they might have very different perceptions of what set up
is best, and you can't you know, necessarily agree on
a common standard. The world of high fidelity audio is
(44:08):
filled with a lot of marketing that strikes me as
being just a stone's throw away from pure pseudoscience. But
I've talked about that before, so I'll leave it for now.
So the cassette Walkman has been out of production since
twenty ten. The brand still exists for digital audio players,
and some artists do continue to put stuff out on
(44:28):
cassette because nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Personally,
I do miss the days of putting together the perfect mixtape.
There's something really special about getting one just right, like
finding that right progress of songs so that you know
you've got like the really high energy number comes in
at song number three, and then you've got a cool
(44:48):
down number for song number four. That kind of thing.
Making a curative playlist doesn't really scratch the same itch
for me. There's something really tactle about using cassette tapes
and creating a mix tape that way, and slapping a
really good mixtape into a portable music player and then
just going for a walk is a pleasure that I
think people should really seek out if they're able to
(45:10):
that kind of thing is just one of the simple
pleasures of life if it's accessible to you. I hope
that this episode was interesting to all of y'all. I
hope you're doing well, and I will talk to you
again really soon.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
For tech Stuff, I'm Cara Price. Kyle Murdoch wrote our
theme song. Join us next Wednesday for Textuff the Story,
when we will share an in depth conversation with the
co founder and CEO of Roadblocks, David Bizuki. If there
are children in your life, you'll definitely want to check
this one out. Please rate, review, and reach out to
us at Textuff Podcast at gmail dot com.
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