Removing the Stigma from Hearing Aids

With the meteoric rise in the sale of earbuds, there’s an increasing amount of speculation about what this means for the hearing aid market. Most miss the fundamental difference, which is that earbuds are selling in the hundreds of millions because consumers like them, whereas hearing aids are still seen by many as a product of last resort, because there is a stigma attached to them.  That means that most people with hearing loss don’t go for a hearing test until around ten years after they should.  If we could get rid of that stigma, and make hearing aids as popular as earbuds, life would be very much better for hundreds of millions of people. 

Hearing aids are not the first products to have a stigma.  I’m old enough to remember a similar situation with glasses.  A child with a sight impairment would do everything they could not to admit it, lest they were labelled “four-eyes” or “speccy” by their classmates.  Most children’s books up to the 1960s had a glasses-wearing child as the scapegoat of the story.  Then John Lennon came along and all of a sudden, glasses were cool.  Nobody could quite explain why, but glasses changed from being something you tried not to wear to being a multi-billion dollar fashion industry, which conveniently managed to restore your sight at the same time.  Whilst the arrival of contact lenses threated their existence, glasses resisted the competition and remain immensely popular.  You no longer make a spectacle of yourself by wearing them, and nobody would consider them as a “seeing-aid”.  So how is that changing for hearing aids?

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The Hearables Market – a Covid Update

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”  Dickens’ could have written that opening line to preface an account of the Covid year for the hearables industry.  Over the last six months consumer demand for earbuds has risen to an unprecedented level.  In contrast, hearing aid manufacturers have been dealt a body blow, with sales tumbling by up to 75%.  As one industry executive put it “we’d have done better if we were an airline”.  Covid has also had unexpected effects on the service industries which have been traditional drivers of hearables growth.  Audio streaming services like Spotify have seen listening times go down, while video streaming and video conferencing have experienced unprecedented demand.

As countries came out of lockdown during the summer, we saw further shifts in usage, but it’s apparent that overall, hearables have done well out of the crisis.  That trend looks set to continue as we face a second wave of the pandemic and further lockdowns.

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Keep Quiet – Lockdown’s over

There haven’t been a lot of positives about the Covid lockdowns, but one of the few which has been widely reported is that we can hear birdsong again.  As traffic volume has diminished and we work at home, the level of noise around us has fallen to a point that most of us can’t remember.  It means that we can hear things we haven’t heard for many years.  On the flip side, we’re missing the sound of social interaction.  As restrictions are relaxed, it’s interesting to consider whether we have learnt anything from this period of unexpected quietness and how it might change our lives going forward.

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Hearables market to reach $80 billion in 2025

Who could have guessed, back in 2014, that a Kickstarter campaign would lead to an $80 billion market segment in just over a decade?  But that’s what is happening with hearables, where a new report predicts that it will reach that size in 2025.

The growth of earbuds, which are now the “must-have” hearable for around 80 million users, has turned into the fastest growing consumer electronics product sector ever, eclipsing even the iPhone.  That growth is set to accelerate even more with the launch of a new Bluetooth LE Audio standard at CES 2020, which allows designers even more freedom, higher quality and new audio applications.

It all started when Bragi managed to raise almost $3.4m dollars for a new concept – a set of stereo earbuds which could stream music as well as measuring your vital signs.  A raft of other startups managed to raise over $50 million in crowdfunding investment between them before Apple arrived with their AirPods, and the rest is history.

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Will Amazon’s Echo Buds challenge Apple’s Airpods?

In the five and a half years since I coined the term “Hearables” the market has grown at an amazing rate.  At the time I estimated that the market for the things we put in our ears might grow to $7.6 billion in 2018.  I think it just nudged over that to reach $7.8 billion.  What I hadn’t anticipated was the success of Apple’s Airpods, which are driving adoption even faster, more or less doubling their sales volume every year.  With the recent launch of Amazon’s Echo Buds, which could attract a new audience with the promise of a life which is “Always Alexa”, as well as the availability of a growing number of Bluetooth enabled hearing aids, the market looks as if it could reach $22 billion in 2020.

Hearables had a slow start.  Although Apple probably started its Airpod design project as far back as 2013, the first thing that the public saw was Bragi’s Kickstarter campaign for their Dash earbuds.  In March 2014, the Dash became famous as the most heavily funded Kickstarter project, raising $3.4 million.  Another crowdfunded startup – Earin, beat them to market by a few months, but Bragi eventually got the Dash out in February 2016.  In that first year of hearables, (or the first fifty-one weeks, as Apple finally started shipping Airpods in the last week of the year), global shipments from all manufacturers were probably not much more than 100,000 units, most of which were the early MFI compliant Bluetooth hearing aids.  In that last week of 2016, Apple probably sold more Airpods than the rest of the industry had shipped through the course of the year.  Four years on from that humble start, 2019 will probably see 75 million sets of hearables shipped.  That makes hearables the fastest growing tech product ever.

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Hearing Loss takes the Stage in Edinburgh

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the largest in the world, with around 2,500 different performances taking place each day.  It attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors over the course of three weeks, sells almost three million tickets and showcases some of the best performances from around the world.  It also seems to attract the world’s worst sound technicians, who think that volume is the only thing that matters.  So it was refreshing to find a couple of shows this year which highlighted the issues of hearing loss.  Around a quarter of us will experience hearing loss during our lives, so it is important that people become more aware of how to protect their hearing, as well as understanding the consequences of hearing loss and for society to remove the stigma of wearing hearing aids. 

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