From records, to cassettes, compact disks, boom boxes, portable CD players, iPods, iTouches, iPhones, and now Bluetooth, there were always HitClips. The most inefficient and pathetic way to listen to music, but the hottest gadget for nineties kids. Who remembers car rides to their grandparent’s house on holidays with their newest fake CD HitClip? Now you too could listen to your favorite thirty seconds of a song on repeat for an hour and a half! Whether it was “Bye, Bye, Bye” by N’Sync, or “Hit Me Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears, I’m sure you could drive your sanity away by the end of the car ride. They first were distributed as McDonald’s toys to promote Timberlake and Spears, and earned Tiger Electronics an astounding $80 million dollars. Other popular HitClips artists included Smashmouth, Clay Aiken, Sugar Ray and, of course, Aaron Carter. After all, who doesn’t want candy? Like every technology, HitClips bit the dust and gave way to new and improved music devices, but we still shouldn’t forget how our young selves cultivated our current love of music.
