Imagine paying money for iTunes and Spotify song previews. Today we're accustomed to high-tech touch screens, shareable playlists, and instant gratification. So why would anyone go back to paying more for less music? Nowadays iTunes gives you a 1:30 song preview for FREE, and charges $1.29 on average for a single track. It's been about fourteen years since HitClips were discontinued, and though they'll always hold a special place in our nostalgia-hungry hearts, the thought of a resurgence today is truly laughable. But in the moment, all that really mattered was that we felt trendy AF. In reality, we all got duped with HitClips. There's certainly an argument that HitClips were more convenient to carry around than Walkmans or CD players, but when you really sit back and think about the logic of it all, it doesn't seem to hold up. And that doesn't include sales through 2004. And it worked, because by 2002, Tiger Electronics had reportedly sold more than 20 million HitClips devices, bringing in $80 million. And in some cases, people (me) already owned the full songs and even full ALBUMS, but still chose to pay more money for a song clip. Think about it: People were willing to spend money on part of a song when FULL SONGS existed for less. And our silly little brains - distracted by the novelty of miniature music players and more collectible clutter for our keychains - cast aside any shred of reasonable thinking and believed this to be true. HitClips did an excellent job of making consumers feel like they needed only a taste of a song to be satisfied. Now, in this particular scenario, Michael was likely too cheap to purchase the full song. In school hallways and on playgrounds, the more clips that swung from your keychains, backpacks, or belt loops, the cooler you were. But the price seemed worth it back then considering the collectible tunes quickly became status symbols for America's youth. That's when things got really exciting.įrom 1999 to 2004, HitClips captivated the minds of budding young music lovers, and over the years, the brand ambitiously moved from basic listening devices to tiny CD players and fun extras.īack in the day, a player cost $20.00 and a cartridge went for $3.99, which seems like a lot of money, even now. HitClips initially debuted as toys in select McDonald's kids meals, but became so popular that they transitioned to the main toy/electronics market. Unfortunately for us, that chip happened to be *NSYNC's " It's Gonna Be Me," which is now almost exclusively associated with memes. Luckily, a single chip was with the devices. I recently uncovered my old HitClips players when attempting to clean my basement, but much to my dismay, my extensive song library - hot jams by A*Teens, Baha Men, Aaron Carter, Destiny’s Child, Dream Street, and dozens more - is still packed away somewhere. So what exactly made HitClips so successful? And could they ever follow vinyl's path and make a comeback in today's world? To answer these questions, let's take a trip down memory lane. Note: This post has been approved by Twitch subreddit mods prior to posting.While, from a tech standpoint, HitClips clearly weren't the most innovative devices, they had such a strong cultural impact that for years, people actually felt compelled to spend money on tiny snippets of full songs - a concept that, in hindsight, seems impossibly absurd. Also willing to do a breakdown of the site's architecture if there's interest for that. Open to suggestions on new features and such. I'm working with the identification cloud service ACRCloud to keep the service free in exchange for their logo at the bottom of the website. I'm aware there are a number of services that used to exist that did this, but have since been turned off/discontinued. There are plans for at least 2 Twitch extensions to utilize this service, which would allow a stream's viewers to quickly find the music playing on a stream, and they'll be published at a later time. The tool has no ads, and is a free service (I'm covering the hosting charges) it's a hobby project for me. You can think of this tool as a sort of Shazam or SoundHound for Twitch. The tool will also return Spotify and Deezer results, and an embedded YouTube video for the returned song identification. Using the tool, you're able to figure out the music playing on both Twitch streams and clips on Twitch. is a small project that I've been working on in my free time.
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