1980's Music Revolution - The Sony Walkman

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The 1980’s was a big decade for the music industry. Several very important products came out using cutting edge technology that shaped the future of the music industry. For example, the four-track cassette recorder, called the “Portastudio,” brought multitrack recording to the home studio, something that was very cost prohibitive before, thus ushering in a revolution in independent music. Other technological advances came at the hands of the Akai S900 Sampler, which expanded hip-hop and electronic beat-making possibilities, and also the Commercial Compact Disk, or CD’s, which upon release in 1982 had storage capacity far greater than a personal computer’s hard drive. The product having the biggest impact on the future of music for consumers was the Sony Walkman.

The Walkman came out in July of 1979 and provided consumers with “a convenient, fashionable way to make an already portable innovation even more portable,” according to Rolling Stone Magazine. People no longer needed to be bogged down with large, heavy boom boxes. Now they could make a statement with their slim, lightweight, fashionable (the original was blue), and portable cassette player. Since the Walkman was too large to fit in a pocket, it became a fashion statement representing a hip lifestyle choice to have your Walkman clipped onto your belt or jacket pocket.

The Walkman changed the way people in our society interacted with one another. Once a person put on their headphones in a public place, they symbolically closed out the rest of the world, thus ushering in what Rolling Stone referred to as “an era of casually neglecting passersby on streets, buses and in airplanes.” The Sony Walkman was “the first popular invention to create a dynamic in which - for better or worse - social participation and interaction took a backseat to personal enjoyment,” according to a Vogue article on technology that changed music.

This highly individualized music experience made a person’s Walkman much more personal (think child/special blanket). The Walkman was marketed as a form of self-expression and personal identity. Without this magnetically strong draw between a person and their Walkman, the personal audio player may never have broken out as successfully as it did.

Sony claims to have sold over 400 million Walkman devices. They were hugely successful for a time. But technology is always moving forward. Eventually the CD took the place of cassettes and then music turned to digital formatting, ushering in the era of the iPod, which turned out to be even more successful than Sony’s Walkman. Now that cell phones are so small, many people don’t even carry a separate music playing device. Instead they stream their music using their phones, bypassing the digital download altogether.

What’s the next step? Let me know your future prediction in the comments!

Image by wikipedia via Pixabay