I don’t know if I’m the only one who has noticed this, but in the past year I’ve seen pretty much every young music (often hip-hop) enthusiast rock Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. It has been absolutely appalling just how much popularity these headphones gained in such a short period of time.
I remember first seeing the commercial and thinking, “That’s great, Dre is doing other things apart from making Detox. Glad to know his priorities are straight.” Also, I have always been under the impression that with regard to true engineering quality of headphones, nothing can or will compare to Bose. So, I figured that this was a petty attempt to keep his name alive.
Then, it exploded. Apparently, Dr. Dre is still one of the most marketable figures in music, despite having not dropped an album in over ten years, and basically limiting his production on all of his proteges’ (Eminem, Snoop Dogg, etc.) albums. Now, Beats by Dre has gotten so big that HTC took a stake in it so that the latter could gain a greater American reputation and market base. I think this is the quintessential example of the importance of marketing. I’ve always tried to be in the camp that if it’s a product with different technology and true engineering quality and value, then it will be successful; I didn’t want to give marketing much credit, even though I knew it was important. But I still never thought it would be this important! I’m not sure how high-quality the Beats by Dr. Dre headphones are, but from its price I would guess that they better be good; otherwise, marketing is really paying off for them.
Anyway, if you have Beats headphones or knows someone who does, I’d like to know your honest review. Did you/he/she buy them because Dr. Dre endorsed them? Did you/he/she look thoroughly at reviews and the quality before buying them? And finally, are they worth it?
(aside: Anyone know how to center the picture on Tumblr? I tried to change the HTML, but it didn’t work for some reason.)
