New designer craze for Headphones

It seems like only yesterday that hooking Apple's white flex into your ears was just about the coolest thing that anyone could do on public transport. Today those little earbuds give out a different message, however. Sure you've got an iPod, they say, but you don't know anything about fashion or music. Because – as you may have noticed if you've seen any footballer getting on to a team bus recently – those who can afford it buy designer headphones these days.

"Now that digital music is so firmly established and growing," HMV's head of technology Ewan Pinder explains, "many consumers are becoming increasingly aware that to fully appreciate and enjoy the music via this new channel you also need to be able to listen to it in the sound quality intended by the studios."

So seriously does HMV take the trend, in fact, that the tottering high-street music chain now puts designer headphones at the heart of its revival plans. Currently, the company lists 146 different kinds on its website, and last week chief executive Simon Fox announced that 25% of floor space would soon be given over to electronic devices, citing the headphone market alone as being worth around £150m. In the US, the trend is strongly upward too, with sales increasing 30% in value between 2009 and 2010. The average amount spent on a headphone sale in the UK is £15, but this figure too is rising.

As these things go, the headphones craze is actually quite rational. If you can afford to carry round a £400 smartphone filled with £500 worth of music, then it does seem like a false economy to listen to it with the cheap, hissy earphones that fell out of the box. Better headphones also tend to leak less, which your fellow passengers will be grateful for. And there is some evidence that, by blocking out external noise more effectively, they also dissuade users from turning the volume up too high, which may protect their hearing in the long term.

Even so, this has mostly been a fashion thing, especially since celebrities got involved. The big beast here is Dr Dre, who released his Beats range in 2008, in partnership with the electronics firm Monster. Retailing for anything up to £449, these headphones have been worn by international stars such as Thierry Henry, Wayne Rooney and, less convincingly, the Tory spin doctor Craig Oliver. New lines endorsed by Lady Gaga, P Diddy and Justin Bieber have subsequently been added to the Beats range. And now Ludacris, 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg, with different companies, have also got in on the act.

"Certainly in the last 12 months, people have been looking for a fashion product that sounds good," says Linda Irvin, product manager at Sennheiser, which has recently launched its own range with Adidas. "There's also been a trend towards larger-sized headphones, which means you have more opportunity to introduce colour, lifestyle and fashion into a product." In part, this has meant designing headphones specially to look good when they are not being used. "It's an urban street trend to wear them not plugged in, but loose around the neck," Irvin explains. Just don't do it, I'd advise, with anything from Justin Bieber's purple Just Beats range.