DRESDEN - For a good portion of time, the cassette tap dominated the sales market, selling hundreds of millions alone in one year. However, with the rise of the CD, the birth of the mp3, and the resurgent comeback of vinyl, sales began to dwindle, and eventually the cassette tape became a thing of the post. Until recently, when Sony decided to bring the cassette back from the dead through the unveiling of their next generation tape, holding a whopping 148 gigabytes per square inch.

The announcement came at the International Magnetics Conference in Dresden, and aside from resurrecting a long forgotten medium by holding an astounding 148 gigabytes per square inch, it begs the question, what will this mean for the iPod, those back in the day walkmans, and mobile phones?

Well, according to Gizmodo:

The tape uses a vacuum-forming technique called sputter deposition to create a layer of magnetic crystals by shooting argon ions at a polymer film substrate. The crystals, measuring just 7.7 nanometers on average, pack together more densely than any other previous method.

While the tape will be available for commercial sale, Gizmodo points out that the uber-cassette was originally developed for “long-term, industrial-sized data backup.” In other words, not for keeping a lifetime of music at your fingertips.

To put this record breaking achievement into more perspective, think of the fact that the average Blu-Ray disc holds 50GB and a standard PC hard drive 1TB. Maybe this will bring back the long lost art of the mixtape.