Professional Microphone Market to Grow More Than 50% by 2021

Futuresource Consulting has just published its new "Global Professional Microphone Report," looking at overall market value, technical innovation and trends influencing the segment, brand leadership and future opportunities. The comprehensive new research finds that the professional microphone market is expected to surpass 7 million units by 2021, up from 4.6 million in 2016. In 2016, a little more than half of vendor revenues came from wireless microphones.

On November 9, 2017, I attended the Futuresource Audio Collaborative 2017 conference, at the Ham Yard Hotel in London. With the topic "A Change is Gonna Come," the conference was a valuable and insightful event. To entice our readers to actually spend the hours listening to those interventions (and for those that don't have the time to do it), I will share some of the key highlights, adding some personal takes on the topics addressed.

The professional loudspeaker market, currently valued at $2.6 billion worldwide, is on track to reach $3.6 billion by 2021 despite a number of major market shifts, according to a new market report from Futuresource Consulting. Futuresource’s new ‘Professional Loudspeaker Market Assessment’ report defines the market, offering product and vertical segmentations across 4 major regions and 9 key countries using inputs directly from the industry itself.

The overall market for headphones is mature in terms of units, but there are pockets of significant growth. Demand for wireless headphones continues to energize the global market driving up sales, increasing prices and fueling innovation of smart features. Sales of wireless headphones have accelerated rapidly this year and are on track to reach $9.5 billion, up 83% on 2016. These are some of the finds detailed by Futuresource Consulting in its latest Headphones Market Report: Worldwide Outlook.

Futuresource Consulting continues to release consistent market research that provides guidance for any company in the consumer electronics space and specifically for the audio industry. In their latest 2017 Worldwide Headphones Report, Futuresource predicts further growth in global headphones aftermarket both in units shipped and average prices. The report predicts 4.1% growth to 362 million units in 2017, generating revenues worth $15.5 billion.

Keeping up with its tradition of combining market research intelligence with insightful industry events, Futuresource Consulting announced the return of its highly successful event dedicated to audio trends, to be hosted at the Ham Yard Hotel in London, November 9, 2017. Audio Collaborative 2017 brings together key industry influencers to discuss the services, hardware and content plays that will shape the future audio landscape.

A new report from Futuresource Consulting shows the home audio market continues to outpace the wider home electronics market, thanks in great part to the success of smart and wireless speakers, and soundbars. Futuresource's new Worldwide Audio Report highlights that Amazon commands 90% of smart speaker’s sales as well as other key trends. However, the story is not so good for many legacy categories such as hi-fi systems and loudspeakers and home-theatre-in-a-box systems.

Market research and consulting company, Futuresource Consulting recently released a new report in the consumer electronics CE space covering the emerging voice personal assistants (VPAs) category and smart speakers. The report highlights that we are the beginning of a wider market transformation, with voice personal assistants (VPAs) at the heart of a new CE land grab.

We are witnessing a pivotal moment for the audio industry with the prominence of far-field voice recognition and connected speakers now top of the mind for consumers. In the aftermath of Apple's recent HomePod speaker announcement, the home audio experience, by itself, was confirmed as the key selling argument, with its potential as an interface for interaction with consumer electronic devices and services, paving the way for the Smart Home.

The audio industry was once again shaken to its foundations by Apple's announcements at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2017. The product updates and sneak peeks made at this Apple Special Event, on June 5, 2017, were extremely rich in surprising technology revelations, even though its implications might not become clear until a few weeks or months later. After all, the WWDC conference - a developer's conference - is traditionally where Apple builds the foundations for what will be its underlying short-term/long-term strategies, serving mainly to motivate developers and strategic partners.