HitClips

» see hitclips.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

hitclips was a portable music player for children, made by tiger electronics and sold under hasbro. it launched at us retail in august 2000 and ran for four and a half years before hasbro shut the line down in february 2005. the device used a removable flash-rom cartridge that held a single one-minute clip of a single song in mono, lo-fi, with a small built-in speaker and a 3.5mm jack.

the catalog was the radio-edit chorus of the teen-pop block. britney spears, backstreet boys, nsync, aaron carter, jessica simpson, christina aguilera. there were 159 singles from 84 artists. each chip cost about four dollars. the players themselves came as keychain dongles or as small dock players in licensed plastic shells of mickey mouse and lizzie mcguire. hasbro shipped thirty million units by april 2003.

this product did not reach turkey at any consumer scale. i was a teenager in ankara on dial-up in those years, the music people my age were trading was mp3 files of full songs ripped off napster and kazaa, swapped over msn or carried on cd-r. a tiny american toy that played thirty seconds of a chorus would have read as a thing for very young children even by the standard of someone who was a very young user of the internet at the time. the cultural object hitclips actually was, the thing it was selling, was 2001 us tween consumer ritual, going to claire's or target with a friend and a parent's twenty-dollar bill and picking out chips for each other.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

the engineering was deliberately limited. the chip was a one-time mask-rom carrying about 78 seconds of compressed mono audio at low bitrate. no metadata, no firmware updates. the bom cost on tiger's side was a few cents per chip, the retail markup made the chips themselves the business and the player a delivery mechanism. it was a razor-and-blades model dressed as a toy.

the labels liked it because the contract was straightforward. licensing a 60-second clip was a fraction of a full song mechanical, and the radio version of the chorus was the part the labels were already pushing on top-40 stations anyway. the kids buying chips were not the audience the label cared about losing on cd sales. for two years it was the cleanest deal in the industry.

~ what killed it ~

the apple ipod shuffle launched in january 2005 at $99. it held 240 full songs in 512mb of flash and weighed less than a hitclips cartridge. that month hasbro discontinued the hitclips line and announced the successor product, videonow color, which played small fmv discs. the cartridge model could not survive a child being able to hold three hundred songs that did not need replacing.

by 2007 hitclips were a flea-market object. a small online community still trades the chips and the player shells, the late-period licensed players in particular, because the lizzie mcguire and that's so raven ones are sealed-box collectibles now. the chips themselves still play; the mask-rom does not degrade. it is one of the few dead media formats where the original hardware just keeps working as long as the player's plastic battery contacts hold.

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