Sony has just announced that the cassette Walkman is done. The standard response to this seems to be "they still made cassette Walkman?" The technology hasn't been in vogue for at least a decade now, as CDs and MP3s have since eclipsed the cassette as the portable music storage of choice.
While I'm sure that there are some fans who will lament the demise of the cassette for music, to be perfectly honest the cassette was kind of terrible. It was portable sure, but it was complicated, an older or cheaper player would eat the tape, and the sound quality was never really there. It did the job, and you could take music on the go, but the moment a better solution arrived it was inevitable that the cassette player would be abandoned. It did, twice over, and it was.
Still, while I'm not exactly mourning the loss, the Walkman was a landmark system, and it is very likely that the iPod and various other MP3 players would never have happened. The Walkman was the first time you could really take your music with you. Vinyl fans might go on all day about the sound quality, but they'll never go on about portability. Going jogging with a 45 would just lead to disaster. Yes, there were portable radios out long before, but they were radios, and as a result they were not your music.
That second part is the other reason it caught on, and one of the reasons why the portable music players of today are a bit infamous. With a blank cassette you could record any song you wanted, provided you had access somewhere. Friends' records, radio broadcasts, or any sound source, you could nab a song you like, and put it in a unique mix. It was today's file sharing controversy, in miniature. The selection might have been limited by what was accessible, but plenty of people had a briefcase of cassettes filled with albums they had never actually purchased. It was easy, it was convenient, and it was portable. The virtues of the cassette mirror the virtues of its spiritual successor.
It also was the first sign of a disconnect between the people who make music, and the hardware manufacturers who make the devices to play it. Just as MP3s would just be a file on a few people's hard drives had hardware manufacturers not designed small players to bring them along, the cassette really wouldn't have made it if it wasn't so easy to copy to them. The average stereo of the early 90s was actively designed to make transferring music from one cassette to another, or from CD or vinyl, extremely easy, often using one touch controls. Just as a CD can be ripped with the press of one button now, getting a cassette copied back in the day was very easy.
As music labels are fighting file sharing and trying to figure out how to get people to buy more music, I can't help but think that the Walkman was a warning. It might not have seen as huge a shift as the MP3 player eventually represented, but the same problems were there, and the same issues were designed in to the system. It should have been clear, even then, that the way people listen to and acquire music was changing, and that a smart label had to figure out ways to mitigate their losses and keep on top of any new developments. It didn't happen, and as a result portable music rules and sharing is unstoppable. It all started with that cassette.
