I. The Little Machine That Let Korea Walk Around With Its Feelings
Before music became a utility—before it dissolved into the frictionless abundance of streaming, before the playlist turned into an algorithmic prediction—there was a period in South Korea when listening still felt tactile, effortful, and faintly ceremonial. In that earlier world, one did not merely access songs. One waited for them, recorded them, rewound them, protected them from tape hiss and accidental erasure, and sometimes gave them away as though they were coded fragments of the self. Few devices captured that world more completely than Samsung's mymy (마이마이), the portable cassette player that became, for many Koreans, less a product than a generational shorthand. Samsung's own historical materials identify mymy as an early portable cassette player introduced in 1981, while a later Samsung retrospective emphasizes that the 1982 cassette mymy became so popular that the brand name came close to functioning as a generic term for the product category in Korea. That slight discrepancy in year across Samsung's own retrospective pieces is worth noting, but the broader fact is clear: by the early 1980s, mymy had entered the Korean market as one of the defining names in portable listening culture.
What Samsung was selling, in other words, was not merely a machine. It was a new experience of mobility (이동성) and personal listening (개인 청취). A Samsung global history of portable audio describes mymy as a 400-gram cassette player that allowed users to record songs from the radio and carry them "anywhere and anytime," while Samsung's Korean Newsroom recalls the device as roughly the size of two cigarette packs, compact enough to feel radically modern in a consumer culture still learning how to equate smallness with sophistication. This mattered because in South Korea of the early and mid-1980s, miniaturization was not just a technical achievement; it was an emotional one. The smaller the machine, the more intimate its promise. A stereo in the living room belonged to the household. A cassette player in one's bag belonged, for the first time, to a person.
The product's cultural force came from timing as much as engineering. Samsung's historical account of portable audio links the rise of cassette listening to the spread of radio culture, blank tapes, and a more active listening habit in which users assembled their own preferred sequence of songs. The company explicitly describes the cassette era as helping transform music from something merely appreciated into something collected, and listeners from passive recipients into active selectors. That is corporate retrospection, certainly, but it is also an accurate description of a broader media shift. mymy was part of the moment when Korean consumers began to experience music not simply as broadcast content but as something they could shape into a private world. The cassette was not only a storage medium. It was a form of curation before the age of metadata.
It is telling, too, that retrospective Korean coverage continues to frame mymy not as an obscure legacy product but as a cultural reference point. EToday notes that while the world spoke of the Walkman, in South Korea the word mymy (마이마이) itself came to stand in for the whole class of portable cassette players. That is what happens when a brand becomes fused with a habit of life. It ceases to be only merchandise and becomes atmosphere. In that sense, mymy was one of the first Korean consumer-electronics brands to master what today would be called category capture: the feat of making a proprietary name feel like the natural name of a social practice.
II. A Product, a Prop, a Promise: How mymy Became a Youth Object
The most revealing thing about mymy may be that its specifications were already social. Samsung's museum-based recollection highlights several signature features: auto reverse (오토리버스), a talk line (토크라인) function, two headphone jacks, and two independent volume controls. These are easy enough to list as selling points, but they are more interesting if read as evidence of a usage scenario the company clearly understood. mymy was not designed only for solitary listening. It was designed for shared listening (함께 듣기)—for a pair of friends, classmates, or lovers walking through a campus or a street with one soundtrack and two ears, but not necessarily the same preferred volume. In the age of wireless earbuds, that design can seem quaint. In the age of cassette modernity, it was almost poetic: a consumer electronic device imagining intimacy as part of its basic function.
Samsung's broader product heritage, preserved in later exhibition coverage and museum materials, suggests that mymy was never just one device but a recognizable family of products whose design evolved through the 1980s. National Science Museum records, for example, document later models such as the MY-A20, described as a pocket-size, rounded portable cassette player sold in 1988 at a listed suggested retail price of 21,600 won, and the MY-A80, an ultra-mini model with a built-in speaker, also from 1988, listed at 84,900 won including earphones. Another museum entry for the MY-Q1 describes a mid-to-late-1980s Samsung portable cassette player equipped with a Dolby circuit, auto reverse, and the ability to operate during rapid charging. These details matter because they reveal that mymy was not merely a single nostalgic artifact but a brand architecture—an evolving attempt to keep portable audio desirable as design, price, and user expectations diversified.
If the hardware told one story, the advertising told another. Samsung's retrospective treatment of mymy-era promotion makes clear that the product was framed not only through function but through scene (장면). The copy and imagery emphasized portability, companionship, and the pleasure of carrying music into the rhythms of daily life. This is what makes mymy such an instructive case in Korean brand history. It was sold not simply as an audio device but as a lifestyle object (라이프스타일 상품) before that phrase became standard marketing vocabulary. The machine promised not only sound quality or convenience but a way of inhabiting youth: outdoors, in motion, paired with someone else, connected by the small drama of shared listening. Samsung's own archival commentary on old advertisements explicitly places 1986 mymy commercials within the broader evolution of Samsung advertising in the 1970s and 1980s, underscoring how the brand belonged to a larger shift toward affective consumer imagery.
There was also an important ritual dimension to mymy's place in Korean life. Samsung's graduation-gift retrospectives explicitly include mymy among the iconic presents of an earlier era, which is more revealing than it first appears. A graduation gift is rarely just a useful thing; it is an object through which adults ratify a young person's movement into a new social stage. To receive mymy was to receive more than circuitry. It was to be told that one was now old enough to have a portable interior life, old enough to carry taste, memory, and preference outside the home. In this sense, mymy participated in what might be called the ceremonial economy of late-twentieth-century Korean adolescence. It was not luxury exactly, but it was aspiration made handheld.
That aspiration did not disappear when the cassette market began to mature. A 1999 Maeil Business Newspaper report on mymy Wingo (마이마이 윙고) shows Samsung still trying to extend the brand into a changing audio environment, describing the line as having achieved a relatively strong market position after its October 1998 launch despite broader post-IMF market weakness. The same report notes that Samsung supported the brand through street concerts, a song contest, and a design competition, which is significant because it shows the company continuing to treat mymy less as a mere device name than as a youth-facing cultural platform. Even at the end of the 1990s, when the analog era was already under pressure, Samsung understood that mymy's deepest asset was not the cassette mechanism itself but the symbolic charge of being close to young people's everyday desires.
III. What mymy Could Do, What It Could Not, and Why It Still Matters
To praise mymy honestly is to recognize both its ingenuity and its limits. Its strengths were clear. It miniaturized listening, made radio recording portable, and gave consumers a new sense of autonomy over sequence, repetition, and mood. It also translated consumer electronics into something emotionally legible. The presence of two headphone jacks and separate volume controls, for instance, suggests a design language centered not simply on utility but on relational use (관계적 사용). mymy made it possible to imagine that listening could be private and shared at once—private because the soundtrack belonged to the users rather than the household, shared because the device physically accommodated intimacy. That double logic remains one of the product's most elegant achievements.
But the weaknesses were built into the medium itself. Cassette culture was always precarious. Tapes stretched, jammed, degraded, and carried with them the ever-present risk that a favorite song might be scarred by noise or erased by accident. Even Samsung's nostalgic retellings acknowledge the fragility of the cassette experience, recalling the familiar misery of tape damage and distorted playback. Those imperfections are now often wrapped in retro sentiment, but at the time they were also genuine inconveniences. What later generations remember as analog warmth (아날로그 감성) was, in practical terms, often a compromise with mechanical vulnerability.
The larger market eventually made those vulnerabilities fatal. Samsung's own audio-history materials note that MP3 players, commercialized in Korea in the 1990s, cut typical device weight to around 70 grams, roughly one-sixth of mymy's quoted 400 grams, while greatly expanding storage capacity and convenience. In one sense, digital audio simply finished the project mymy had begun. It took the promise of portability (휴대성) and drove it to an extreme the cassette could never reach. The irony of technological succession is that the pioneer often survives only long enough to teach consumers what they will soon demand in a more efficient form. mymy taught Korean consumers to want their soundtrack in motion. MP3 players and later smartphones merely answered that desire more completely.
And yet products do not remain culturally alive because they were the last word in performance. They remain alive because they condensed a way of feeling. Even years later, when Samsung gathered historical products from employees for exhibition and archival use, mymy appeared not as a marginal curiosity but as one of the recognizable emblems of the company's and the country's consumer past. That afterlife tells us something important. mymy was never only about cassette playback. It was about the arrival of portable desire (휴대 가능한 욕망) in Korean modern life—the idea that technology should be smaller, more personal, more stylish, and more emotionally expressive. It belonged to the period when consumer electronics stopped being merely durable goods and became companions, symbols, and memory devices.
That is why mymy still merits attention in any serious discussion of Korean brand history. It stands at the meeting point of industrial design (산업 디자인), consumer culture (소비문화), youth identity (청소년 정체성), and advertising imagination (광고적 상상력). It was Samsung's answer to a global technological shift, but it also became something more specifically Korean: a branded object through which a generation learned to curate feeling, to share music selectively, and to experience technology not only as function but as selfhood. If streaming has made music easier to access, it has also made that earlier effortful intimacy harder to recover. mymy belonged to the age when listening required intention, and because it required intention, it often meant more. In the end, that is what survives: not only the product but the world of patience, proximity, and chosen songs that it carried in its small plastic body.
References
Samsung Newsroom. (2014, October 30). 휴대용 오디오 기기의 역사: 음악을 사랑하는 모든 사람들을 위해.
Samsung Newsroom. (2016, September 20). 왕년에 마이마이로 라디오깨나 들어보신 분이라면!.
Samsung Newsroom. (2014, October 29). Music becoming my life: The evolution of portable audio devices.
EToday. (2019, June 20). [옛날광고로 보는 경제] 우리 모두가 음악을 들을 수 있다는 건.
National Science Museum. 삼성마이마이MY-Q1휴대용카세트플레이어.
National Science Museum. 삼성마이마이MY-A20휴대용카세트플레이어.
National Science Museum. 삼성마이마이MY-A80휴대용카세트플레이어.
Maeil Business Newspaper. (1999, April 1). 삼성전자/마이마이 윙고.
Samsung Newsroom. (2012, October 23). 브라우니와 함께 하는 삼성전자 제품 광고의 변천사.
The Korea Economic Daily. (2021, August 2). 애니콜부터 마이마이까지…삼성, 임직원 기증품 모아 전시.
