The Sony Walkman
The day music went for a walk. In July 1979 Sony put a stereo in your pocket. Here is how the blue-and-silver Walkman TPS-L2 turned every street into a personal soundtrack.
The original Sony Walkman TPS-L2: Anna Gerdén, CC BY-SA 3.0
A tape player built for walking
Before 1979, if you wanted music on the move you carried a radio and shared it with everyone around you. Sony changed that with a small metal box in blue and silver. In March 1979, at the request of co-founder Masaru Ibuka, Sony's audio team took the compact Pressman recorder that journalists used for interviews and reworked it into a playback-only stereo cassette player. Add a pair of light headphones and you had something brand new: a private soundtrack you could take anywhere.
The finished TPS-L2 went on sale in Japan on July 1, 1979, for around 33,000 yen. It did not record. It did one thing, play your tapes in stereo, and that was the whole point. Clip it to your belt, press play and the world around you suddenly had a soundtrack.
Doubters, then a sellout
Plenty of people wondered who would want a tape player that could not record. Sony itself expected to move about 5,000 units a month. Instead it sold more than 30,000 in the first two months, and the little player quickly became a must-have for students, joggers and commuters.
The name was a problem overseas, because Walkman was made-up English that some sales teams thought sounded odd. So early models went out as the Soundabout in the United States, where it arrived in June 1980, the Stowaway in the UK and the Freestyle in Australia and Sweden. In the end the original name won everywhere, and in 1986 Walkman earned its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.
How it changed everyday life
The Walkman made headphones normal in public. Suddenly the bus ride, the school hallway and the morning run all had a soundtrack only you could hear. Paired with the mixtape, it let people curate their own moods, one side of a tape at a time.
It also kicked off a whole category. Rival brands rushed out their own personal stereos, and Sony kept refining its design through the 1980s and 1990s with smaller bodies, radio tuners, auto-reverse and rugged sport models.
The long goodbye
Over three decades Sony sold roughly 220 million cassette Walkmans before ending cassette Walkman production in Japan in 2010. The name lived on through CD, MiniDisc and digital players, but for many OGs the real thing will always be a tape, a pair of foam headphones and a pocket full of spare AA batteries. Original players now sell to collectors, and plenty of people still hang on to the one they got as a gift decades ago.
- The original Sony Walkman TPS-L2: Anna Gerdén, CC BY-SA 3.0
- A 1979 TPS-L2, the first Walkman: Binarysequence, CC BY-SA 4.0
Text written by Original General.
