A few years ago the magnetic recording industry successfully transitioned from longitudinal to perpendicular magnetic recording at an areal density of around 100 Gbit/in2. From the media perspective this entailed metallurgical engineering techniques such as changes in seed-layers, grain decoupling schemes, alloying of the magnetic layer, understanding distributions and inclusion of a soft magnetic under-layer (SUL). As the industry approaches the next major technology transition after perpendicular magnetic recording, Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) has emerged as one of the leading contenders to extend magnetic recording beyond 1 Tbit/in². This presentation will discuss HAMR from a media perspective and in particular will focus on the metallurgical aspects of the media structures being developed for HAMR, and their challenges and potential in a real-liferecording system.