Coming Soon: A Micro Boombox

SAN FRANCISCO (02/22/2000) - What's the size of a Pokemon trading card, downloads Net music, and can flush grown-ups from any room in seconds flat?

Nope, not a Pokemon trading card. It's Tiger Toys' new HitClips Rockin' Micro Boombox, a deceptively diminutive device that promises to pound out pop tunes at levels powerful enough to annoy at least your immediate neighbors. Tiger Toys (a division of Hasbro Inc.), Atlantic Records, and other recording companies have pooled their research to create HitClips, a new microchip-based music format that they claim "tears down the barriers between toys and music."

Whew--one less thing for parents to worry about. The HitClips product line centers on thumbnail-size microchips containing prerecorded music samples, mostly bubble-gummy singles by such teenybopper chart-toppers as Sugar Ray and Christina Aguilera.

"HitClips provides an excellent vehicle in which to encourage kids to become music enthusiasts," says Lee Stimmel, vice president of marketing with Atlantic Records. It is intended as a playful introduction to music.

But even if Juilliard applications don't spike in the near future, kids can collect the clips and trade 'em with friends. They're inexpensive enough to replace with babysitting cash when the clips get lost on the playground, devoured by the vacuum cleaner, and ruined in the rinse cycle.

As for players, the HitClips are not tied to the Rockin' Micro Boombox. You can play the chips on a Micro Player, which comes with a single earplug (perfect for discreet classroom use). You can also plug them into the HitClips Alarm Clock, which doubles as a chip player and storage device. Rounding out the product line is the Yahoo! HitClips downloader, which lets kids download music from the Internet by simply plugging the device into their PC's headphone jack.

The products are aimed squarely at the allowance-earning income bracket, with prices in the $8 to $10 range for the players and less than $25 for the downloader. Most HitClips products are scheduled to be available this summer--with any luck, after school lets out.

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