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| Beats headphones, by Dr Dre, above, will grab £1.25bn of the £5bn headphones market this year. |
Anyone considering buying headphones for a young relative this
Christmas, take care before splashing out the £150 or more that the most
fashionable – the Beats, or Skullcandy, or Urbanears models – can cost.
Each
brand marks them out as one of a "tribe", regardless of sound quality.
Whereas 20 years ago the most important thing for a teenager was the
brand of trainer on their feet – Nike, Reebok or Adidas – now it's the
brand covering their ears that matters.
Beats headphones, with
their red cord and large "b" on the earpieces, began appearing in music
videos in late 2008, largely through the efforts of the company's
co-founders, the rapper Dr Dre
and the music entrepreneur Jimmy Iovine. That sparked rocketing sales
to a teenage demographic looking for a new way to distinguish themselves
out from their peers.
In doing so, Beats' emergence showed that high-priced headphones would sell, becoming as much a fashion accessory as a gadget, commanding prices over £200 – a bracket previously reserved for the audiophile niche.
A
decade ago, the white tendrils of an iPod's headphones might have
marked the wearer out as trendy; nowadays it makes them just one of the
crowd, and Apple's in-ear headphones are too common to bother with. A
teenager wanting to stand out needs something big – and bold.
"Companies
like Beats and Skullcandy have realised that kids today want something
that looks better, over questions of sound quality," says Sam Ruffe, who
works at The Kinc, a marketing agency whose clients include Skullcandy.
And
those kids (or their parents) will pay: worldwide, the market for
headphones will be worth over £5bn ($8bn) this year, with 284m units
shipped, according to the consumer consultancy Futuresource; over-ear
headphones grabbed half of sales. And Beats alone will grab around
£1.25bn – while the total market is forecast to grow by 5% annually for
the next five years.
Skullcandy was originally designed for skiers
and snowboarders, by Rick Alden, who got the idea on a chairlift in
Park City, Utah. Starting in 2003, he managed to persuade skating and
skiing shops to stock the product, which became known as an "extreme
sports" brand.
Urbanears, meanwhile, brought Scandinavian design
and a flourish of colour to the burgeoning headphone market, releasing
two "collections" of headphones a year in limited-edition colours.
The
continued success of Beats brought competition as these other brands
began chasing the new demographic of people willing to spend money to
wear their branding choice on their ears. Skullcandy moved off the
slopes and into the high street. Now, they are more likely to be seen on
the bus than on the piste.
Audiophiles aren't impressed by the
brigade of bolshy Beats products, which often pride bass and look over
acoustic refinement. "I just bought a set of the Beats Solo HD
headphones – it's a Christmas gift for my 13-year-old daughter," Chris
Miller, a software engineer, told the Guardian, adding: "I think they
are overpriced and you are paying a premium for the brand name. They
aren't bad, but I have headphones that sound better for half the price
that I paid for the Beats."
Sound quality, though, isn't
necessarily the point – which may have been missed by more traditional
"audiophile" brands such as Germany's Sennheiser, the Dutch brand
Philips and the American Bose, who were caught unaware that colouring
the earpiece and cord green or red could affect sales as much as their
sound quality.
Andy Watson of Futuresource says you might struggle
to tell some headphones apart at the factory. "With everyone owning the
same generic-looking personal audio player or mobile phone, it's the
headphones that do the differentiating. There is certainly cachet and
brand equity attached to many of the brands, beyond their intrinsic
value. Much of it is about positioning a lifestyle rather than a
product."
Yet the growing tribalism of headphone ownership has led to derision in some quarters – such as the blog "Long Way From Compton",
which features pictures of people wearing Beats headphones, and
measuring the distance from there to the notorious gang-ridden Los
Angeles district from which Dr Dre emerged.
