Open earbuds sales climb 12% as wider wireless market slips, Omdia data shows

Within the category, clip-on designs such as the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds formed the larger segment, taking 61 percent of open-ear sales, while hook-style models including the Shokz OpenFit 2+ made up the remaining 39 percent, the Omdia figures show.

Growth was heaviest at the cheapest end of the market. Open earbuds priced below $50, among them the Soundpeats Pop Clip2, recorded a sales increase of more than 320 percent over the same period.

Open earbuds differ from conventional in-ear models by leaving the ear canal unobstructed, so a wearer can hear traffic, a housemate speaking or a train announcement while listening to music. TechRadar, whose reviewer has covered the format since about 2023, describes it as a relatively new but rapidly expanding part of the headphone market.

The article places the sales numbers in the context of what it calls a broader consumer retreat from always-connected gadgets. It points to the growing popularity of feature phones bought as digital detox devices, continued demand for physical media such as turntables, CD players and cassette players, and what it describes as limited consumer interest in the AI features used to market new hardware. It also cites the backlash against smart glasses, which it says have been widely banned in courts, theaters and restaurants.

Rising gadget prices and a plateau in what devices can do explain part of that shift, according to the article. It adds a further factor: being connected in a technical sense often means being online, which it says increasingly means having personal data scraped and stored, and being pulled away from the physical world.

Open earbuds typically carry fewer of the smart features used to sell in-ear rivals, such as AI assistants, health tracking and real-time language translation. TechRadar attributes this partly to the small earpieces, which leave little room for the supporting hardware, and partly to the pitch itself: the buds are meant to be light in weight and light in features so they sit on top of daily life rather than adding layers to it.

The article also notes a resurgence in wired earbuds, which offer no meaningful noise cancellation, in contrast to the best noise-cancelling headphones, long marketed on how thoroughly they isolate a listener from a noisy world.

TechRadar's account rests on Omdia's market data and the publication's own testing of the format; no competing set of sales figures is cited in the article.