Sunday, March 8, 2015

The HitClip down spiral are foreshadowing of illegal music downloads


This is a photo of the popular 90s music player called HitClips. This photo was taken in the late 1990s. HitClips were made by Tiger Electronics, and were popular for around 5 years. They were first distributed by McDonalds with Happy Meals, but then the excitement made these popular outside of the restaurant chain as well. In 1999 this music device made Tiger Electronics approximately $80 million. Some say they would have rather spent their money on a real mp3 player than on individual clips themselves. HitClips reached out to singers and bands ranging from the Backstreet Boys, to Aaron Carter, to NSYNC. Each clip contained one song, and you had to buy the player as well. Although the excitement of these didn't last for a very long time there is a great similarity that is found between these HitClips and music today. People stopped buying HitClips because it was getting pricey to buy the individual clips themselves for just one song. And today we find that more and more people are downloading music illegally because of the lack of wanting to pay for songs on iTunes individually. 

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