Founding Roland: inventing demand for electronic instruments (1972)

Making a market instead of entering one

The choice that set Roland’s course was less what to build than how to compete: not to step into a market that already existed, but to invent products that created their own demand. Kakehashi came out of the electronic-organ work at Ace Electronic Industries and, on founding Roland in 1972, made a rhythm machine — a category with no settled market — his first release, then within two years set a synthesizer, an electronic piano, a guitar amplifier and effects units beside it. A maker with almost nothing to inherit chose instead to keep opening new markets of its own.

That method is why a specialist from Osaka ended up shaping music far beyond Japan. The instruments it invented — its drum machines and bass synthesizers, the TR-808 and TB-303 among them — supplied the raw sounds of hip-hop, house and techno; the set-type electronic drums of 1985 grew into V-Drums; and in the 1980s Kakehashi went so far as to co-author MIDI, the open standard that let rival makers’ instruments talk to one another and enlarged the field for everyone. The same disposition — to grow by invention rather than by scale — is what made Roland’s name and, later, what exposed it, since a company that lives by creating a niche also lives inside that niche’s limits.