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BY Andrea Bossi

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Last fall, Raza Haider, president of premium consumer audio at Bose, noticed something peculiar when dropping his daughter off at college: more students were wearing wired headphones than he’d seen in recent years. “Even [my daughter] made a comment like, ‘this is nuts. When I was in high school, we would have made fun of kids who had wired headphones, and now it feels like all the cool kids have them,’” Haider says.

There’s a rift from Bluetooth headphones underway that isn’t just anecdotal. Sales increased 15% year-over-year from 2025 to 2026, totaling $354 million in 2026 according to data from market research company Circana. That might not seem very high, but in the context of the broader, usually mostly flat-growth headphone market, it’s pretty noteworthy, says Paul Gagnon, VP and industry advisor for consumer technology at Circana.

“If you look at the last six or seven years, wired headphones had been declining.…