The First Personal Stereo
Next: July 1, 2027
Music in your pocket, wherever you go.
The story
Where it comes from
This Story marks the anniversary of the day music started to travel with us. Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka wanted to listen to music in stereo on long flights abroad, so engineers turned a small mono tape recorder into a stereo player for him. His fellow founder Akio Morita tried it and saw that young people who wanted music all day would love it too. The first Walkman, the TPS-L2, went on sale in Japan on 1 July 1979, priced at 33,000 yen.
How it's celebrated
There is no organised observance, but it is an easy day to mark. Put on your headphones and take a walk with an album you love, played from start to finish. Make a playlist, the modern mixtape, for a friend and send it with a card, or dig out an old cassette and remember the first song you ever carried around with you.
Did you know
- Many people inside and outside Sony doubted a tape player that could not record would ever sell; by the autumn of 1979 it was so popular that shops ran out of stock.
- Its new headphones weighed less than 50 grams, at a time when ordinary headphones weighed 300 to 400 grams.
- In its first twenty years, Sony shipped about 186 million cassette Walkmans around the world.
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