Here is the image that will probably stick in my mind from these Olympic games:
Not just because these headphones make Michael Phelps look goofier than usual, but because for the past couple of years headphones have been crowding out earbuds among the young, “hip” set. An idea for a post came to me because within the past week I’ve seen two teenage boys eating dinner at my restaurant while wearing headphones around their neck. And out on the street or at the store it’s not uncommon to see a kid wearing these while walking around. Living in the Midwest I assume that every kid living on the coasts are wearing these.
Dr. Dre peddled his headphone brand, Beats, to a few Olympians including Phelps. The resurrection of the headphone reminds me of the reversion to vinyl records – the reasons for the switch being explained as vinyl’s superior sound quality while we all know that young people buy vinyl just to be different. There’s no doubt that the resurgence of the headphone is largely a fad, and it helps that they can be worn as an accessory like a necklace or a pair of Air Jordans.
But I see the headphone trend as symbolic of something else too. Earbuds have always been seen as a pretty clear cut “do not disturb” sign. They match up well with the stereotypical introverted, self-indulgent youth wearing them (though everyone wears them on the subway, the airport, at Starbucks). Headphones communicate the same thing but are even more in your face than that. Earbuds are a request to be left alone. Headphones are a statement. A person wearing earbuds just wants to listen to something other than their surroundings. This is a choice. Headphones are part of the identity. “I want to communicate to you that I’m listening to something else besides my surroundings. This is who I am.”
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i like your analysis. do you think headphones are just a fad though? some things change for good in terms of style. best example i can think of is how men used to wear hats in the 20s or something, and no longer.
At least these headphones do not let you impose your noise on other people. My definition of hell is riding the subway where you can’t get away from junk-hominids making a cloud of noise like electronic crickets with their ipod-style headphones.
I’m not certain, but I thought headphones were better at cancelling out ambient noise, something that would be useful in a noisy athletic venue or subway.
I live in a hipster neighborhood (that has a large vinyl record store) but I never see anybody wearing headphones. However there are few to no high school and college age kids and no hip hop element. I’ll look around more.
I love seeing two people travelling together on say a train, both wearing headphones. I want to smack their heads together like Moe and say “Do you people know each other ?”
Earbuds don’t stay in my ears very well and headphones are better at blocking out surrounding noise. Good head phones have much better sound than earbads.
However, when I work I wear earbuds because its quiet and I can pull them out of my ears when someone comes into my office.
DJ’s wear DJ-style headphones which must be large to provide loudness, robustness and good passive noise isolation, useful features in a noisy club. By 10 years ago, being a “DJ” while in high school had replaced being in a rock band as the way for average looking guys to get hot girls. Kids started walking around with DJ-style headphones hanging around their necks to signal “I’m cool”.
Skullcandy jumped on the back of this to sell Chinese factory generic headphones blinged up to bejaysus. They made headphones into a fashion item. You “wear” headphones. They could not be more visible. Perfect for status signaling.
Skullcandy did a phenomenal marketing job but had no headphone engineers up to a few years ago and just focussed on futt bucking Chinese factories on price. As a result, their product was junk. (They seem to have gotten their act together and are now launching their own designs. I haven’t listened to them but they look great and they seem to have hired a real audio guy to run their development).
Anyway, they started the trend but blew their own nuts off in a race to the bottom so Beats were able to prosper with their USD350 headphone. Once upon a time in the headphone space, only Sony could sell in volume above USD25. A USD350 price point is a new phenomenon and is only possible because people are carrying around a USD600 music player/phone/computer/tricorder in their pocket with space for thousands of songs, none of which you have to pay for if you don’t feel like it. You have money to buy a fancy headphone if you don’t pay for the music.
As a result of personal music, speaker sales are down and headphones are up. More and more hifi speaker companies are launching premium headphones. It is hard to justify a USD300 price tag on an earbud but easier for a full-size over the ear headphone.
The music producers behind beats, Dr. Dre and Jimmy Lovine, contractually oblige all their artists to wear the Beats headphones in their music videos. There is not as much money in music as before so the labels are looking for other ways to turn a profit. They now own the total name and image of the artists since Fiddy make a gazillion dollars from the sale of Vitamin Water to Coke. The labels want their cut because they make the investment to make the artist famous.
They also did an excellent job of getting sports super stars to wear their product since the beginning. The product doesn’t look big on NBA and NFL stars who would have struggled to find a headphone to fit them that wasn’t a dorky home audio unit. Anyway, the kids are emulating their music and sports heros.
In 2011, Beats sold 51% of itself to Taiwanese nut cases HTC for 300 million although they recently bought back 25% of that. Think about that, a 4 year old headphone company making poor quality headphones worth 600 million . Beats didn’t do that, that wasn’t them, the music pirates made that happen.
Headphones, texting endlessly, looking at cell phones while eating with others (recently I had dinner at a restaurant with three others – while I turned off my cell phone before eating, the other three looked at their phones sporadically during the dinner). Am I the only one who finds this all very disturbing? (Actually, Haw. Libertarian recently had a good post in which he expressed a similar disgust). All of this technology is destroying people’s abilities to listen to and relate to others – this will not end well.
@Ulick McGee:
My musical tastes vary quite a bit from everyone else’s, but I would be surprised if music piracy were the root cause of this. Most younger people seem to get their music through convenient, legal sources such as iTunes or Amazon, not piracy. Access to illegal music these days generally takes at least a small amount of computer savvy, and it seems silly to suggest that the market for Beats (urban thug wannabes) are adept computer users. (Although it’s probably not out of the question that this subculture would share MP3s widely amongst each other).
That being said, I think for most people, piracy is largely irrelevant to their music listening habits. People can listen to Pandora / Last.FM / etc. if they want radio-like playlists, or they can go to YouTube and search up their favorite artists and get tons of music that way. YouTube can’t get to you in your car (yet) but with the ubiquity of cell phones and cell phones as music players / web browsers I think obviates most of the need for music ownership AND piracy.
Headphones worn in public just scream “I have an excessive earwax problem!”
Headphones come in two designs – open and closed. With open you can still hear your surroundings and the music leaks out too. Closed designs achieve more isolation both ways. Open generally sounds better and more detailed at the same price point.
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