Dr. Dre, Ludacris, and the HD Headphone Market

Billions of people worldwide listen to music every single day, and as of the past 5 years, many are listening through their iPods or other MP3 players. This has created an entirely new mainstream market of high-quality headphones. Previously, such headphones were only sold and marketed to people who worked and recorded in studios. Now, they are being marketed to anyone who loves music - specifically hip-hop music.

Several companies have emerged to take advantage of this lucrative market, and are selling high definition, high performance, studio quality headphones. A few have even paid big bucks to get major celebrities to endorse and co-brand them.

Initially, there were the "Beats By Dr. Dre" headphones, which were released by veteran super-producer Dr. Dre and Monster - the company best known for selling high definition television cables. Then, more recently, came the "Soul by Ludacris" headphones, which were released by none other than multi-platinum rapper Ludacris and Signeo USA.

There has been no official data released on the amount of sales for the headphones, which by the way retail between $150 - $350. But you can imagine that the sales have to be doing extremely well.

The deals with Dr. Dre and Ludacris were reportedly multi-million dollar deals, and it makes sense when you consider how many music listeners are hip-hop fans. Music industry experts agree that there at least 50 million people who listen to hip-hop in the United States. If just 1% of them bought the headphones, that would be 500,000 sold and millions of dollars in revenue generated - not including sales from other countries like Canada or the UK.

Of course, if the market thrives too well, there will be even more celebrity co-branded headphones entering the market - perhaps from the likes of Kanye West, Pharrell, Lil Wayne, and other household names. Unconfirmed reports are even saying that Apple and Microsoft are planning to release their own HD headphones.

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