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How Beats by Dre played you like a fool

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Re: How Beats by Dre played you like a fool

#71

Post by smrtinsert »

bane wrote: post #32
robmccoll wrote: post #12

Sennheiser HD 280 Pros - best headphones for under US$100. Balanced sound, good isolation, responsive and clean, comfortable for long sessions. http://en-us.sennheiser.com/professional-dj-headphones-noise... http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD-280-Pro-Headphones/dp/B0... I just don't understand purchasing headphones as a fashion statement. I read it as "I want you to know I like popular brands over high quality and m…

You don't buy beats for the sound, you buy beats to signal your tribal membership. People go to extraordinary lengths to join groups and send this membership signal. It's almost instinctual and done without a lot of thinking and good marketers know how to leverage this. It's dumb, but it is what it is, and people wrap an awful lot of their identity up in their chosen tribe rather than just being themselves.

right - the marketed.

Re: How Beats by Dre played you like a fool

#72

Post by AlexandrB »

vkjv wrote: post #61

sigh $14 in components for a $100 product seems like a really tight margin and not exploitation to me. The tooling chain for these things (injection molding, etc.) is really expensive. Not that these are a great product, but I don't see them outright ripping anyone off.

The quote from the article is actually "...it costs Beats a mere $14 to make according to some experts." I'm assuming they factored the tooling costs into the cost of making these.

At the scales Beats is operating the tooling chain costs, while initially high, get distributed over millions of units.

Re: How Beats by Dre played you like a fool

#73

Post by maxerickson »

vkjv wrote: post #61

sigh $14 in components for a $100 product seems like a really tight margin and not exploitation to me. The tooling chain for these things (injection molding, etc.) is really expensive. Not that these are a great product, but I don't see them outright ripping anyone off.

That bit of the article is not particularly detailed, but it sounds like the $14 would include the molds and everything else. It doesn't say "$14 in components", it says "it costs Beats a mere $14 to make".

Re: How Beats by Dre played you like a fool

#74

Post by bane »

sjwright wrote: post #47
bane wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't buy beats for the sound, you buy beats to signal your tribal membership. People go to extraordinary lengths to join groups and send this membership signal. It's almost instinctual and done without a lot of thinking and good marketers know how to leverage this. It's dumb, but it is what it is, and people wrap an awful lot of their identity up in their chosen tribe rather than just being themselves.

I agree it's dumb, but the important thing to realise is that pretty much everyone is falling for it pretty much all the time. It's hard to argue that this same motivation isn't driving sales of iPhones over Android and vice versa. Or Canon versus Nikon. Nike versus Adidas. Harvard versus Stanford. Obama versus (!Obama). Ford versus Toyota. We can rationalise many of these decisions, but so can the people who bought…

Well, like I said. It's basically instinctual. Humans are social animals that form into groups and groups need in-group out-group signaling to define themselves. Joining a group identity like this is basically our animal bits controlling what we do. It's subtle, and people are often surprised when they realize that this is what they're doing. But if you buy into a group identity and you can't rationally explain why, or have to post-rationalize, it's probably this effect.

But it's also one of those things that, whenever you see it, is a reminder that humans have a long way to go and aren't as different from the rest of the animals as they'd like to believe.

Why Apple purchased beats, is that it helps tie together several different social tribes, with Apple now able to try to cross-sell between them, something very hard to do.

Re: How Beats by Dre played you like a fool

#75

Post by viiralvx »

q7 wrote: post #50

Imho beats headphones don't sound good. The bass is ridiculously overpowered and distorts nearly constantly. Now, tastes are different, and you might want exactly this experience with that distorted bass. If you create both the music and the speaker, like Dre does, and you wanted that experience, the right approach would have been to add such a distorted bass to your track during mixing/mastering, and then create hea…

Yeah, I really concur with the sound quality argument. I got a pair of Beats on the cheap from a friend, but I got tired of wearing them after awhile and eventually switched to earbuds to just listening to my music cause of the sound quality. Ordered a pair of Sennheiser Momentums though, should be getting those by Saturday, so I'm hoping to return to a solid pair of over-ear headphones again.

Re: How Beats by Dre played you like a fool

#76

Post by blowski »

coldpie wrote: post #66
icebraining wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not for the sake of buying; it's for the sake of showing them off. Like we did with jewelry for millennia.

Or the ultimate in form-over-function: women's footwear.

And ties - what purpose do they serve other than social signals?

Re: How Beats by Dre played you like a fool

#77

Post by exodust »

nodesocket wrote: post #3

I consider myself a bit of a an audiophile, and always argued that beats headphones are inferior. Their balance is abysmal, way too bass heavy, and shit plastic design. They however mastered marketing, which as it turns out wins the "game". My choice of headphones are Sol Republic ( http://solrepublic.com/tracks-hd-on-ear-headphones-with-v10-... ) or a nice German Sennheiser.

Not bad but check out these, they're super comfortable and I love the wood panelling! They might even sound good too...

http://www.thehouseofmarley.com/legend-anc.html

Re: How Beats by Dre played you like a fool

#78

Post by icebraining »

gagege wrote: post #55
JohnBooty wrote: post #39

I find the Beats-bashing to be very suspect. It's funny how a hobby (hi-fi, audiophile, whatever you want to call it) dominated by white men just happens to get so incensed over something marketed by and to the urban crowd. Why aren't we angry about every other thing that's endorsed by celebrities? Why this one in particular? I don't think the folks behind Activia yogurt "played everybody for a fool" or "had us over…

No, we bash Beats because they are an inferior overpriced product. I'm no audiophile, but I do like to think of myself as a savvy consumer, so when I hear some 14 year old saying "Beats are better" I just might tell him that he can get something way better for the same price. I hate seeing people get duped by marketing. That story is not hypothetical, by the way.

Inferior and better are subjective. I'm not sure the 14 year old judges by the same metric as you.

Re: How Beats by Dre played you like a fool

#79

Post by Grue3 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #39

I find the Beats-bashing to be very suspect. It's funny how a hobby (hi-fi, audiophile, whatever you want to call it) dominated by white men just happens to get so incensed over something marketed by and to the urban crowd. Why aren't we angry about every other thing that's endorsed by celebrities? Why this one in particular? I don't think the folks behind Activia yogurt "played everybody for a fool" or "had us over…

>It's funny how a hobby (hi-fi, audiophile, whatever you want to call it) dominated by white men just happens to get so incensed over something marketed by and to the urban crowd.

Isn't peddling overpriced shit to underprivileged (and underinformed) population the actual problem here? You have there a white guy, Jimmy Iovine, selling shit product to poor urban youth, and it's audiophiles who are at fault for exposing this fact?

Re: How Beats by Dre played you like a fool

#80

Post by bane »

picks_at_nits wrote: post #69
bane wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't buy beats for the sound, you buy beats to signal your tribal membership. People go to extraordinary lengths to join groups and send this membership signal. It's almost instinctual and done without a lot of thinking and good marketers know how to leverage this. It's dumb, but it is what it is, and people wrap an awful lot of their identity up in their chosen tribe rather than just being themselves.

> People go to extraordinary lengths to join groups and send this membership signal... > It's dumb, but it is what it is, and people wrap an awful lot of their identity up in their chosen tribe rather than just being themselves. Cough. Written on Hacker News, but not Reddit or Digg or Facebook. Cough. C’mon, we’re sitting right in the middle of a tribe. Even writing that Sennheisers sound better is sending a tribal s…

I'm not saying I'm not dumb at times.

FWIW, I have a $20 pair of Sony unknown model # headphones I picked up at Ross. I bought them because they were over ear and cheap not because they're white, have Sony logos on them, or because I wanted to make a statement about what group I'm in or not in.

But yeah, HN is also very group membership oriented and people spend extraordinary amount of time to build things with things that signal that they're part of this group. The trope is "yet another photo sharing app" right?

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