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In early 1979, Sony's co-founder Masaru Ibuka — by then in his early seventies, semi-retired, and chairman in title only — was preparing for a transpacific flight and decided he wanted to listen to opera the whole way. He carried a Sony TC-D5, a heavy professional-grade cassette recorder the size of a small lunchbox, with conventional headphones. It worked. It was also miserable. He went to Norio Ohga, the executive deputy president, and asked him to build a playback-only stereo version, light enough to walk around with.
Ohga's department had something close already. They produced a small mono cassette recorder called the Pressman, marketed to journalists for interviews. The audio team gutted it, removed the recording electronics and the speaker, added a stereo amplifier, fitted a second headphone jack so two people could listen at once, and built it into a metal case painted blue and silver. They called the prototype the TPS-L2. Ibuka tried it. So did the chairman, Akio Morita. Morita, who had run the company's commercial operations since the 1950s, decided to launch it. He aimed it at teenagers.
The TPS-L2 went on sale in Japan on July 1, 1979, at a price of about ¥33,000, roughly $150. Sony forecast sales of about 5,000 units a month. It sold more than 30,000 in the first two months. There was no external speaker, only the headphone jack. The "hot line" button on top let you fade the music and talk through a tiny built-in microphone — Sony at first worried that listening alone in public was antisocial.
The international rollout started in February 1980, and the name went through three failed versions first. American sales objected to "Walkman" as broken English; the device was launched in the U.S. in June 1980 as the Soundabout. In the UK it was the Stowaway. In Australia and Sweden it was the Freestyle. By November 1980 Morita had overruled the regional offices and made the Japanese-English name worldwide. When he was knighted by the Queen in October 1992, the British tabloid The Sun ran the headline "Arise, Sir Sony Walkman."
The Walkman was not the first attempt at a wearable music player. In the early 1970s a German-Brazilian inventor named Andreas Pavel had patented a belt-mounted stereo cassette device he called the Stereobelt. He had pitched it to Philips, Yamaha and Grundig and been turned down by all of them. After the Walkman launched, Pavel sued. He lost an initial round. He kept refiling, country by country, for two decades. In 2003, with Pavel threatening fresh infringement suits in remaining territories, Sony approached him to settle. The 2004 agreement was reported as a cash payment in the "low eight figures" plus ongoing royalties on certain models.
Sony then iterated on the hardware once a year. The 1981 WM-2 was significantly smaller than the TPS-L2 because the engineers reversed the orientation of the playback head and switched to soft-touch buttons. The 1982 WM-F1 added a built-in FM radio. The 1982 WM-7 added Dolby noise reduction and auto-reverse. The 1983 WM-20 — the first "cassette-size" Walkman, no larger than the cassette inside it — used a telescoping case to hold the tape mechanism. The 1985 WM-101 was the first model powered by a single gum-stick rechargeable battery, the proprietary form factor that Sony would build cameras and laptops around for the next decade. The 1986 WM-F107 had a small solar panel.
The market followed the hardware. Within ten years of launch, Sony held about a 50 percent share of the U.S. portable-stereo market and 46 percent in Japan. Sony shipped over 100 million cassette Walkmans by 1989 and 186 million by 1999. Aiwa, Panasonic and Toshiba built copies; in 1983, cassettes outsold vinyl records for the first time. Cassettes would keep outselling vinyl until compact discs overtook cassettes in 1991.
The cultural side of the device became a small academic field. The Japanese musicologist Shuhei Hosokawa coined the term "Walkman effect" in a 1984 essay to describe how the device let a listener overlay private sound on public space — a transformation Hosokawa argued was qualitatively new. The aerobics boom rode the same hardware: between 1987 and 1997, the number of Americans who said they walked for exercise rose by about 30 percent. In 1986 the word "Walkman" entered the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1982 the mayor of Woodbridge, New Jersey, banned wearing a Walkman in public after pedestrian accidents.
In 2002 the Austrian Supreme Court ruled that "Walkman" had become so generic in German that Sony could no longer prevent competitors from using it on their own portable players — a textbook example marketing professors call genericide.
By the late 1990s the line had branched. The Discman, the MiniDisc Walkman, the DAT Walkman, then the Network Walkman digital audio player, launched on December 21, 1999, and using Sony Memory Stick storage with the proprietary ATRAC codec. Sony refused to support MP3 until 2004 to protect Sony BMG. Apple shipped the iPod in October 2001 and within four years had taken the U.S. portable-audio market.
Sony retired the cassette Walkman in Japan in October 2010. Total cassette-Walkman production over 31 years came to about 220 million units. The last cassette model sold in the United States, the WM-FX290W, was a digital-tuning weather-radio Walkman first released in 2004. In 2025 the Museum of Modern Art included an original 1979 TPS-L2 in its Pirouette exhibition of pivotal design objects.