Music Lovers, Throw Your iPods Away, Walkman to Make a Comeback With the Introduction of a Mega Memory Cassette

TheFineBros, which posted a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk_vV-JRZ6E) on YouTube that became viral - with over 8 million views in 3 weeks - on young people's reaction to the cassette recorder, may have to make another video soon.

Probably an instructional for young people how to use a Walkman or other cassette players.

Forbes reports that cassette players such as Sony's iconic Walkman may soon be fashionable again and it might be the turn soon of the iPod to become a technology relic. The reason is Sony's announcement of a new method of data storage that uses magnetic tape that could hold 1498GB per inch.

The Japanese electronic giant unveiled the new technology on Tuesday at the International Magnetics Conference in Europe.

Given the new technology, it means prototype cassettes could hold 185TB of data in a single cassette tape, more than five times the capacity of a prototype cassette that could hold 35TB of data made in 2012 by a collaboration between FujiFilm and IBM. It also dwarfs the average Blu-Ray disc, which could hold 50GB of data and the standard PC's hard drive of 1TB.

Tech Web site Consequenceofsound.net estimates such kind of tape could hold 64.75 million songs based on an average length of 3 minutes per song. That means one single cassette tape would last the owner 134,896 days or almost 370 years.

It could even place the entire U.S. Library of Congress, which is about 10 total TB, 18.5 times inside one tape

The introduction of the CD killed the cassette tape market, which until the 1990s, was selling 442 million tapes but eventually dwindled to only 274,000 tapes by 2007 that album producers eventually no longer made them.

Although reports said that the tape would soon be available for commercial sale, Gizmondo stressed that the super tape was developed for long-term, industrial-sized data backup and not mainly for music, game, video storage and playback.

With the technology, expect tech companies to race in producing again cassette players, even perhaps including giants Apple and Samsung which specialise in smartphones and tablets.

Would this also lead to the revival of the Betamax?