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Walkman Walkman, is a brand of portable audio players manufactured and marketed by Japanese company Sony since 1979. The original Walkman started out as a portable cassette player and the brand was later extended to serve most of Sony's portable audio devices; since 2011 it consists exclusively of digital flash memory players. The current flagship product as of 2022 is the WM1ZM2 player. Walkman cassette players were very popular during the 1980s, which led to "walkman" becoming an unofficial term for personal stereos of any producer or brand. 220 million cassette-type Walkmen were sold by the end of production in 2010; including digital Walkman devices such as DAT, MiniDisc, CD and memory-type media players, it has sold approximately 400 million at this time. The Walkman brand has also been applied to transistor radios, and Sony Ericsson mobile phones.