Sony has finally retired the Walkman cassette player, citing lackluster demand for the outdated device.
The company says they produced their last batch of the device in Japan in April and once that inventory clears out, the Walkman will be retired to the history books.
A Chinese company will still produce some units after Sony’s supply is exhausted but it is hard to believe they will continue to produce for the foreseeable future.
Sony began selling the Walkman in 1979 and has seen 220 million units sold over the past 31 years.
Walkman sales have been in steep decline since the introduction of portable CD players and even more so with the launch of portable MP3 players earlier this ddecade.
Sony will continue to use the “Walkman” brand, however, in phones and media players.
Result for: cd players
According to research by retail experts, video games will prove to be Britain’s number one form of entertainment in 2008, beating music and other video products for the first time. Verdict Research predicts the video games market will grow by £1.37 billion ($2.19 billion), about 42% in 2008. The figure outstrips music and video sales which were expected to stagnate anyway.
The entire video games market in the UK is valued at about £4.64 billion ($7.42 billion), compared to music and video at £4.46 billion ($7.13 billion). “The music and video market is not just suffering from a slowing of growth but a massive transfer of spend to online,” said the report’s author Malcolm Pinkerton. “So in actual fact, the sales via high street shops are being hit a lot harder than the overall growth figures would suggest.”
The report claimed that the music market gained revenue from sales of digital downloads but was hurt by growing piracy, price deflation and a decline in physical CD sales. “Games represent a relatively cheap, but also exciting and innovative pastime,” said Matthew Piner, author of the Video Games and Consoles Retailing report. “As more people save money by staying in, a video game, although it may cost three of four times as much as a DVD or CD, offers much more longevity and hence better value for money.”
The Entertainment Retailers Association agreed that the games sector had a great year, but took issue with the figures. It points out that the videogame figures include both hardware and software units sold. “So to compare like with like, you’d have to add in DVD players and CD players,” said ERA spokesman Steve Redmond.
Result for: cd players
Sony Music Entertainment Japan has announced the launch of a new disc standard today, Blu-spec, in which it hopes to use blue lasers to “cut CDs more accurately than would be possible with red lasers.”
The company will also use polymer plastic for the actual discs and the combination will improve the quality of audio CDs while keeping compatibility with current CD players. Incompatibility has been the main weakness for Super Audio CDs and other audio standards.
The first Blu-spec discs will hit Japan on Christmas and will be mainly classical music discs as well as Jazz. Among the 60 titles available at launch will be Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.
The discs will all be Sony but they are hoping to “foster cross-label support” from the other Big 4 labels.
