Spark53:53560: The Butterfly Effect, Part 3 – The Personal Audio Player
This story is part of The Butterfly Effect, a special Spark series about advancements in technology that have had a far greater impact than most people anticipated.
Sony’s first Walkman wasn’t technically a new invention when it hit the market in 1979.
“It was putting a tape deck and a pair of headphones plugged in [together]. That’s all it is,” said Michael Bull, professor of sound studies at the University of Sussex in the UK. Spark host Nora Young.
Audio cassettes had been around since the 1960s. In the late 70s, Sony introduced the Pressman, a bulky tape recorder with voice recording features and a built-in speaker aimed at journalists.
But Akio Morita, then chairman of Sony, had bigger ambitions. The Japanese company removed the speaker and recorder from the Pressman, paired it with a pair of slim headphones, and gave it a now-iconic blue and silver deco accented by a fluorescent orange “line in” button.
The TPS-L2 Walkman model exploded in popularity and continued to change people’s relationship with music and the way they listened to it. It also set the pattern for wearable devices, traces of which remain in the design of our smartphones today.
Bohuš Blahut, television producer and vintage tech enthusiast, remembers vividly the first time he tried using his cousin’s Walkman. The then nine-year-old Chicago native was visiting relatives in Canada.
“When I put it on I couldn’t believe the fidelity. It was so much better than anything I had ever heard that was portable,” he said.
Sony sold millions of walkmans, helping cassettes overtake vinyl records as the musical medium of choice. The brand name continued as consumers migrated to the use of compact discs and, eventually, digital MP3 players.
The Walkman brand had all but disappeared by the 2010s, as the digital music market was overtaken first by Apple’s iPod and then by smartphones.
But it remains a well-known name and product, thanks in part to its frequent appearance in nostalgia-fueled pop culture, from stranger things at Marvel guardians of the galaxy.
“I think it’s become one of the icons of 80s shorthand, the same way if you walk into a party store and say, ‘I want to throw an 80s party,’ they will have like a banner that contains Pac-Man and a Rubik’s Cube,” Blahut said.
‘I made you a mixtape’
Taking a Walkman outside on a run has taken the music listening experience from the privacy of your family room to the public sphere.
It not only changed where we listened to music, but also how we listened. With these headphones, you have become a unique audience, even in a crowd. It could be stimulating, especially for young people at the time.
“Suddenly you didn’t have to put your music on dad’s stereo anymore and make him scream how bad it sucks. You can just put it on, and it wasn’t a compromise to listen to it on your system; it always sounded good,” said Blahut.
Not everyone was amused.
“The criticism of the Walkman when it first came out was the older generation… saying it was anti-social. ‘You put your headphones on, you can’t hear what other people are saying’, etc., etc.” , Bull said.
It also helped proliferate the popularity of the mix tape.
Now you can personalize a tape with your favorite songs, create a playlist of tunes that elicit a certain emotion – or create one for the object of your affections when you can’t find the right words yourself.
“What could you do more romantically: think of the other person, think of the playlist you want, give it to them, and then imagine them walking around? It’s fantastic. It was totally new,” said Bull.
More is better – or is it?
The iPod and other digital music players freed users from the physical tape or CD in the 2000s.
Suddenly, you could be carrying hundreds, even thousands of songs in the palm of your hand. Creating a playlist on Spotify or iTunes, for example, has never been easier. But as Todd Green argues, something was lost along the way.
“I remember recording songs on the radio and you had the DJ intro and then they were talking for the first 10 seconds of your favorite song or something and [you’d] be like, ‘Oh no, I’ll record it another day,'” said Green, an associate professor of marketing at Brock University in Ontario.
“I don’t take as much satisfaction or interest in creating a playlist. I’ll just drag and drop 1000+ songs I like and just say play random. And that’s not all much the same.”
Smartphones have again upset our habits.
Services like Spotify encouraged users to stream music through a subscription, instead of buying albums or singles. Algorithms that monitor your listening habits suggest new content based on what you’ve heard before, instead of waiting for you to read the next album review in rolling stone Where Fork.
Digital marketing expert Josh Viner has postulated that in the future, our devices will be able to personalize a playlist on the fly by reading our heart rate or other biometric data.
“Our devices will know exactly what we want before we know we want it…if we want to go for a run and if we want high-paced music,” he offered as an example.
Rumors earlier this year suggested that the next Apple AirPods (wireless headphones) would have a built-in heart monitor for this purpose, although the idea was later scrapped.
Perhaps more importantly, the smartphone does more than just play music.
“It’s competing with a lot of other things, like contacting people or watching something [on video] …where it’s never been in this competition before, especially when you’re on the road,” Bull said.
Walk backward
In recent years, cassettes have grown in popularity with a small but notable audience – despite the fact that finding a working cassette player is much more difficult and they have relatively low audio quality.
Cassettes gained 9% in popularity last fall compared to the same period last year, according to Luminate Data, a US-based music sales data firm.
In a quote first provided to rolling stone Last October, Luminate CEO Rob Jonas said millennials were the most likely to buy cassette tapes, in part because they wanted to directly support artists of their choice instead of donating their money to music services. streaming, which offer artists low payouts per play.
Bull says he’s seen people dig up their old iPods, perhaps in direct response to the versatile nature of modern phones.
“A lot of people still go back to it…because they want something that’s just music,” he said.
So the next time you see someone on the bus buzzing with their headphones, holding a phone in their hand, it’s worth remembering where it all started.
Produced by Adam Killick, Nora Young and Olsy Sorokina.