Creating a mixtape is an art. There are a lot of rules. You have to start strong to grab attention, then you take to turn it up a notch. But you don’t want to lose it so soon, so you have to cool it down a notch. Add to that the sorely limited space on the standard cassette (and the difficulty of using that storage medium so far into this millennium, and we wouldn’t blame you if you ditched the idea altogether and stuck with Spotify.
Sony, however, legendary creator of the Walkman, which let people take music everywhere, has a new answer. They have developed a cassette that can hold an absurd 185TB of data. By making a very fine layer of magnetic material whose thickness n in the realm of about eight nanometers, they are able to pack more data per square inch of cassette medium than three Blu-ray disks, for a total of 3,700 Blu-ray disks per unit, or almost 65 MILLION songs. Take a moment to absorb that.
This is a cost-effective solution that is meant primarily for archiving purposes, where data access speed might not be an issue, or huge storage space is a requirement. Sony has announced that they might offer it on a consumer level, though that might not be a thing until a few years from now.
As files get larger and larger, giving better and better quality, we will soon need the storage space to match. For long-term, high-density solutions, this might just be the answer.