The next and more important phase in the mobile music revolution debuted inaus-piciously in 1963 and blossomed slowly. The Philips compact cassette would replace the eight-track, conquer the mobile music market, and introduce an even greater level of personalization by allowing users to record their own choice of material.
Furthermore, it would compete vigorously with LPs, 45s, and CDs for decades.26 The Philips cassette, with its low speed of 17/8 ips and narrow Ferric Oxide (FeO3)-coated tape was, sonically, a step backwards from vinyl. To gain its widest acceptance it took the augmentations of DuPont’s Chromium Dioxide (CrO2) coat-ing, Dolby B and C noise reduction, and eventually “Metal” tapes (iron particles with a cobalt alloy layer on a plastic backing).27 Throughout its gradual develop-ment, improvements, and widespread uptake there were many contributors to the ultimate ubiquity of the audio cassette, the various machines that played it, and its transformative power.
I was at the White City, BBC TV studios in 1979 demonstrating some new music technology on Tomorrow’s World when I met one of the program’s hosts walking down the hall. He held up a small silver-and-blue plastic box and asked if I had seen one. I said yes, because I owned several small cassette recorders, but then I noticed this one was much more compact than any of mine. He stuck the smallest, flimsiest headphones I had ever seen on my head, and I realized I would never be without music again.
The first generation, playback only, cassette Walkman was somewhat frag-ile, hissy, and ate tape, but in 1979 it had no competition. Twenty-five years after the transistor radio introduced music anywhere, Sony’s TPS-L2 Walkman, a fourteen-ounce pocket-portable cassette player, launched the next era of per-sonalized mobile music. Now you could take your own choice of music and lis-ten to it almost anywhere. LPs still sounded better but were neither mobile nor user-recordable. The cassette recorder made the perfect collection of music avail-able to hundreds of millions of people and the Walkman allowed them to listen to their perfect collection anywhere. Sony made hundreds of models, through the DAT TCD-D3 of 1991, the MiniDisc of 1992, to the digital Discman of 1999. The Walkman became a billion-dollar industry with 50 million units sold in the first ten years and 220 million units sold worldwide over its three-decade lifespan.28 I do not know of any statistics that quantify how the Walkman affected producers and productions but it moved music another notch toward ubiquity, utility, and dispos-ability while at the same time providing options to the homogenized, advertiser subjugated grip of broadcast radio. The Walkman was more than music to go. It
introduced an epoch of individually determined aural and emotional environments and offered the wherewithal to isolate consciously from the surrounding environ-ment. It permitted a willful yet acceptable social barrier and introduced the fully customizable, everywhere audio experience. Fully customized music was no longer tethered to place, nor was it a shared experience (Sony removed the second head-phone jack from later models). It provided a personalized soundtrack to life, and life on the move.
Like its disruptive ancestor, the Regency Transistor radio, the Walkman made Time Magazine’s All-Time 100 Best Gadgets list. The impact of the Walkman was termed “The Walkman Effect” by Shuhei Hosokawa. Hosokawa points out that (unlike the transistor radio) the Sony Walkman was regressive technologi-cally, a simplification or devolution, in that it removed the record function and the speaker from the portable cassette machines of the time. Doing so made it slim-mer, sleeker, and single purpose. The Walkman, in combining personalization with extended mobility, in the form of a fashion accessory, was a conceptual shift. As Hosokawa notes, walking is the most primitive means of human transportation and the Walkman connects it with music.29 Music combined with movement is nothing new, but this is individually personalized music in a fixed perspective. Liberated from the limitation of place, the music simultaneously dissociates the individual from his or her environment while forging new correlations. Just as changing the music in a movie alters the emotional impact of a scene, controlling the sounds you hear as you move through your surroundings shifts your perception of tasks, activities, and life itself.
The Walkman was but another step toward the all-pervasiveness of music that Edison’s phonograph began when it disaffiliated music from musicians. Music, divorced from performance, performer, and place, progressively penetrated our daily activities, from records, to radio, car radios, transistor radios, and cassette players, up to our all-in-one, present day mobile devices. A complex combination of technological innovation, consumer demand, and artistic creativity drives trends in the music industry. This could be characterized as a Darwinian process in which the new environment favors randomly selected characteristics in artists and producers.
But, as humans, we are not passive victims of environmental shifts. Those who are intuitively or consciously attuned to technological and social change can modify their cultural behavior and use of technology to benefit from new circumstances.30
The Walkman coincided with increasing interest in aerobic exercise and, almost immediately, it became common to see people exercising using the new device.
Appropriate, personalized music eases the boredom and pain of repetitive exercise, and can increase the intensity of the workout.31 Different workouts demand distinct production qualities. This is borne out by, say, the plethora of yoga music, which tends toward introspective sounds as opposed to high intensity tracks favored for jogging and weightlifting. As consumer usage expands, so do opportunities for producers. The specialization of dance club DJs created demand for longer tracks at dance specific tempos, with different dynamic structures than radio mixes. This
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opened up opportunities for those prepared to acquire new skills, resulting in new genres, dance music producers, and remixers.
By 1983, prerecorded audio cassettes outsold LPs, and vinyl sales declined fur-ther with the uptake of the CD. Through the eighties, and until the introduction of DAT machines and CDRs, cassettes all but replaced reel-to-reel tapes as the standard delivery format for A&R listening copies of mixes. Unfortunately, cas-sette tapes and machines were inconsistent from make to make. Sending tapes to the label or giving them to an A&R person was fraught with potential for misun-derstanding. One situation stands out in my mind: an A&R person called—quite distressed—saying the mixes were “really bright.” Mine were not so I drove to his office; he slipped in the cassette and, sure enough, playback sounded thin and painfully bright. I looked at his machine, flipped the switch from the FeO3 to the
“Metal” setting and the mixes sounded fine. This was a simple mistake that was easily corrected. Regardless, the compact cassette was never a consistent enough medium for critical listening.
All the same, the cassette tape was a transformative technology for consum-ers, artists, and producers. Compared to LPs, 45s, or 78s they were small, light, and could hold much more music. You could record your choice of material and listen privately in a car or, after 1979, on a Sony Walkman—almost any-where. Unfortunately, prerecorded cassette tapes often sounded inferior to LPs, the notes and credits were absent, truncated or unreadable, and locating tracks was a linear and slow process in contrast to the instantaneous random accessi-bility of tracks on LPs. Nevertheless, you could inexpensively record demos and preproduction rehearsals, capture new song ideas while on the move, duplicate your own material for sale at gigs, and fuel your hip hop career with mix tapes.
Long distance travel became less tedious and I began to use flight time produc-tively—listening to demos and writing out parts for the upcoming sessions. For the first time you could choose every track for jogging. When dual tape decks came out, the pause/record function enabled mix tapes, changing Valentine’s Day and painful breakups forever. It was also extremely useful for mocking up preproduction changes in arrangements. DJs even used that feature to extend single length mixes.
The mobility of recorded music made a quantum leap with the introduction of MP3 players and again with streaming services to phones. These on-demand services, offering almost any music, anywhere, anytime, while giving more control to the consumer (pull versus push marketing), open up new territory for those involved in music production. The massive amount of market data now available, including developing trends, allows producers more ways to assess how to orient their work, or not—sometimes artistic assuredness is the best strategy. Delivery and playback technologies affect both consumers and producers and they progress apace. The topics are discussed further in chapter 16, “Transformative/Disruptive Technologies and the Value of Music,” and in chapter 17, under the subheading
“Streaming Audio.”
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