Sony Unveils Tape Capable of Holding Almost 65 Million Songs

For anyone who has a large music collection, having all of the music files saved onto one smart phone iPod or other portable music device can often prove next to impossible – and as a terrific Tech PR move – Sony Unveils its latest gadget. While these devices are able to hold up to 64GB worth of storage, for anyone who loves music and has an ever growing collection, it just isn’t always possible to store everyone on one device. However, Sony recently unveiled a tape that can hold almost 65 million tracks.

The cassette tape has been almost dead for the better part of two decades. Ever since the creation of the compact disc, the days of the cassette tape were numbered. However, some individuals have continued to use tape drives in order to store information on with their computer systems, although even that has started to fall by the wayside with data storage becoming more and more condensed and available to consumers. After all, the cassette tape could only really hold up to maybe 90 minutes worth of storage, with 45 minutes on each side of the tape. This isn’t even long enough for a single live album from some of the many bands that put out such releases. However, this is all set to change as Sony announced it has created a tape that can hold 185 terabytes worth of data on the single tape. An iPod is able to hold 20,000 songs if this is the only data material stored on the device.

If someone wants to store other information onto the cassette tape, it is also possible. The tape has the ability to hold 3,700 Blu-ray discs, which can allow someone to condense their entire HD movie collection for the rest of their life onto a single disc. All of this is possible because the data storage is more closely packed together on the tape then every before. The tape is so expansive that it can hold the entire contents of the Library of Congress nearly 19 times over. Maybe the library might consider saving a bit of money and just converting everything it has onto a single tape.

Of course, the nearly 65 million songs the tape is able to hold is using a three minute song as an example. Granted, most songs really are far longer than this, and more likely than not, this number is more like half the possible storage for the majority of music.