I probably wore it more around school off my ears and around my neck as some sort of status symbol more than actually listening to music between classes.
Eventually my high school banned them when someone recorded test answers on a cassette and used their Walkman to cheat on tests.
The TV show "Square Pegs" captured the era somewhat accurately. The character played by Merritt Butrick was one of those wearing a Walkman around everywhere and sort of reflected the way it felt. To me anyway. YMMV. :)
My parents bought the Panasonic knock-off for my brother for Christmas and he was mortified. He wouldn't even use it, so I got it. I think most people didn't know the difference anyway. Especially if the unit was in your pocket and all people saw were the headphones.
No, I don't recall that being the point at all. The idea was to take your music with you. Listen while you walk, etc. While there are always people who will isolate themselves, that was in no way the intent. If anything, it caused more talk - "Hey, what are you listening to?" was a common question. Sharing headphones to listen to something together was definitely a thing.
Even if you were wearing headphones the same social norms where in place. You said hello to those you knew, and if someone looked like they might talk to you you took the headphones off and talked to them.
It wasn't a barrier to others, it was a way of listening to music you liked privately.
One of the problems of the time were that music was only in albums. Some artists had good singles, but few had good albums, and you were limited to whatever album you brought around with you at the time.
The other thing was that all entertainment was mostly social. Like you didn't watch Simpsons alone, everyone else did. Why listen to onlyy your own songs? Most of mine were weird goth or grunge stuff. But if you were listening to Metallica or something cool, it would be out loud.
IMHO cassettes sounded a lot better. Or maybe it was because the expectations were lower then. My first experience was a Walkman was actually listening to it in my room in bed. Similar with a smartphone. You didn't necessarily want it to be socially isolating. It seems to be why VR hasn't picked up; people get nervous about being isolated for so long.
We just made our own mixes on our own tapes ?
There was debates about quality (that lasted even into the CD era) about music quality. Generally, vinyl was considered better in almost all forms, I don't remember hearing much about audiophiles using casettes.
Imo CD era with digital music more prominent when they came out (first in box form, then in mobile walkman form), because you could get high quality audio on them. This pretty much transformed the DJ world as CDJs started replacing vinyl decks, which aligned with the rise of electronic music since you could do stuff with digital audio that you couldn't do with analog (set cue points, auto beat match, and trigger without having to manually spin the decks)
I guess my vague memories are that wasn't really how they were used in practice. The primary use case was things like during jogging / exercise, long bus/car/plane trips, that kind of thing.
Batteries were expensive, didn't last that long, and they the amount of music you could store or carry around on tapes was limited, so people weren't using them 24/7 like they do with phones these days.
If anything, they were a catalyst for social interaction as people would share mix tapes, listen to music together either with one earphone each or a headphone splitter, compare notes on the latest and greatest models, etc.
Before Walkman, nobody would carry an untethered device which would break if dropped from waist height. Watches were our most expensive everyday carry - secured with straps or on chains.
After Walkman, the market accepted fragility and therefore an endless conveyor belt of broken stuff going into landfill. Encasing mobile phones in glass is the zenith of this madness.
Just nice to have. I mainly used mine to ride my road bicycle like crazy through the forest, to an endless loop of 'Lucifer' by Alan Parsons Project. Or other stuff while riding the subway. And if you were smart you didn't listen at max volume anyways, while the feeble on ear headpieces just rested lightly on your ears. So there was a muted awareness of what was going on around you.
Since this is tapes we're talking about, I'm curious: was this a literally endless loop? Battery life permitting, naturally.
During those 4 hours, that blasted me up to 75kph on flat grounds without headwinds for maybe two minutes, otherwise sustained performance anything between 55kph to 65kph for one hour, depending on fitness, weather, traffic, whatever.
Interestingly the cadence of my pedaling in highest gear never matched, except for the few very percussive sequences, maybe.
Maybe I just liked the thought of riding like HIM >:>
I know this sounds unlikely, but I unknowingly did so called 'interval training', as I later found out. That's how I got that fast.
What actually did it was hands-free. A guy walking, talking and flailing hands to no one was somewhat crazy and even scary to people unaware of technology.
Also, some people still get surprised when you use Siri right in front of them (not because it’s bad, they just never thought about it).
Portable music already existed, in the form of boomboxes, but Walkmen were personal with a whole different dynamic.
I think people these days don’t realise how OK people were with just being bored before mobile phones. You could pick an album, pick a book, but you couldn’t flit around the way you can these days. Whether that’s a good or bad thing I’m somewhat agnostic on.
As others have said, there was no sense of social isolation. This is nore of a modern construct as people become more focussed on self and less on those physically around them.
Batteries were the limitation.
