Alas. It's a sad day today. Japan has lost the cassette tape forever. No more Japanese-Pop Mixtapes. As you may imagine sales have been declining in recent years, increasingly so since the introduction of MP3 players.
It's not the end of the world though, literally. Sony says it "has no plans to stop selling the cassette tape Walkman in other markets. There is still demand in certain regions, including emerging markets, but in Japan there has been a shift to other forms of recording media,” said George Boyd, a spokesman for Sony in Tokyo."
Well, I think Boyd is being a bit optimistic, bless him. If Japan is the first to give up the tape, I very much doubt they'll be the last.
But Boyd is adamant, “There is still residual demand for tape players and while we are phasing out the tape version of the Walkman here, tape as a format is still around and we will continue to sell tape decks for as long as the market is there,” he said.
When the iconic Walkman was released in 1979 (before I was even born) Sony sold 220 million cassette of them in the first 3 decades. But then the CD and MP3, well, Pwned it to be honest.
Source: Telegraph
2 thoughts on “RIP Walkman: Sony stops selling the device in Japan after 30 years”
I still have my Sony walkman as well as the original box….