The Sony Walkman was invented over 40 years ago in 1979, and it left a profound impact on the music industry. It was the first device that mobilized music; previously, music had to be listened to at home using a massive, stationary, record player. When it was first released, the Walkman cost $150, selling over 400 million very quickly. However, it was not immediately popular. In Japan, Sony asked people on the streets if they would walk around using the Walkman and be seen testing it. This immensely increased the device’s popularity. By 1983, cassettes that were used in the devices started to become more wanted than vinyl records.
In 1982, the compact disk (CD) was introduced, changing the music industry yet again. Together, two technology companies, Sony and Philips, brainstormed the idea for the CD because they wanted a small, portable disk that could hold approximately 74 minutes of audio. Following the trend of new technology being initially expensive, the CD player cost around $2600 when it was first introduced, but today it is sold for a little as $15. The CD itself began to revolutionize the music industry further, as it became extremely popular and started to outsell cassettes. In 2000, people bought 2.5 billion CDs worldwide.
Concurrently, personal computers and the internet were becoming more popular, with a growing number of items becoming digitized. The website Napster was launched in 2001, allowing people to download music off the internet for free for the first time. It faced numerous lawsuits and challenges, ultimately shutting down. Still, people had experienced the luxuries of MP3 files for the first time and were unwilling to give them up.
Thus, in 2001, Apple released the iPod for $399, the first digital, portable device that could hold up to 1,000 songs. The iPod’s immense popularity served as a catalyst for the following generations: the iPod Shuffle, iPod Touch, and iPod Nano. iTunes set a precedent for the music streaming services that soon followed, such as Youtube, Pandora, and Spotify. Arguably, the invention of the Walkman inspired its following inventions that allow us to access music so liberally and conveniently today, revolutionizing how we listen to music.
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I really enjoyed your post and I loved how you wrote it as a timeline. It was really cool to see the development of technology in a way I can visualize. I know that for me, the iPod was the "cool thing" to have when I was younger, and it helped that I could learn about what type of technology it developed from. Another random but fun fact I found about the walkman was that it was inspired by Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka's desire to listen to opera on long flights. This is just another example of the shift from invention to innovation in the 1980s.
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It was super interesting to read about the development of the modern mp3 player from the inception of the Sony Walkman in 1989. It was a such an iconic peace of technology. In fact, it's interesting to see how old technology of the 1980s have made resurgences into the modern day. People now collect these electronics because they were so iconic. The Sony Walkman has even been brought into mainstream pop culture such as when it was featured in Guardians of the Galaxy (Video down below). That is indeed what Peter Jason Quill (or Chris Pratt) was jamming to.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMHubIxgYYw
I really enjoyed reading your blog post! As an avid music listener myself, I agree that the Walkman has has a big impact on the way we listen to music in our lives today. I was interested in how it was invented, and I researched a little more on that. It turns out, the Walkman actually didn't take much innovation at all--a similar model had already been created for the use of secretaries and journalists. Sony, however, redesigned and created a new version, which they marketed as the Walkman.
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http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1907884,00.html