A Good Question: What Sparked the Craze in High-End and Fancy Headphones?
Ten years ago, you almost never, ever saw anyone listening to music in public using anything more than a standard set of iPod earbuds or something manufactured by Sony. But if you look around today, you see masses people wearing of expensive high-end headphones.
Check out this graph published by the Huffington Post:
Wow. What sparked that hockey stick? More from HuffPo:
There’s no one reason headphones took off in 2012. It was more like a remarkable concurrence of tech events: The smartphone wars were in full swing as the iPhone 5 launched against Samsung’s supposed iPhone killer, the Galaxy S3. Sweden-based streaming music service Spotify, which entered the U.S. in 2011, had gained a foothold. Beats’ star-powered marketing struck a chord with shoppers. Fashion and tech began to meld.And more people were buying smartphones and listening to music on them, and they didn’t want to look like white-earbud-wearing automatons.
Electronic DJs and culture became pretty popular over the last few years as well. A fashion trend like flannel/plaid in the early 90’s?