Yeah, to me he seems like the gullible victim here. In addition to anyone who buys it, I suppose.

Except he's probably getting paid...

He's not even branding it really. He's just shipping junk from China wholesale and selling it locally, like many other people do. The only difference is that he's somewhat prominent, so he gets some free publicity out of it. That same publicity is probably going to get him into some legal trouble.

What makes you think he isn’t just interested in video games, discovered emulators and liked the product and saw that it wasn’t being marketed to his audience?

Are you familiar with the ways musicians, particularly in hip hop, diversify their business portfolios by selling product lines?

Are you familiar with Fenty, Beats by Dre, etc?

The difference is that those products are actually new things created for those brands, and are (relatively) high quality. This is a cheap emulator box being drop shipped from Aliexpress that already existed before Soulja Boi slapped his name on it. (Not to mention that it's almost certainly violating copyright laws with all the roms bundled with it).

IIRC, Beats are also just rebranded Chinese headphones. You can buy them direct from China for half the price (but without that lowercase "b" on 'em).

Besides the blatant copyright infringement, I ain't seeing how this is any worse.

Apple isn’t going to risk their brand by rebranding cheap Chinese crap, they have nothing to gain from that. It’s much more likely they designed headphones and the Chinese factories made cheap clones.

Apple acquired Beats in 2014. Beats existed - and sold overpriced headphones - for 6 years prior.

Headphones made in partnership with Monster which is hardly ‘cheap Chinese crap’. If anything it’s not cheap.

I never said they were cheap. I did, however, say they were Chinese, and while I can't seem to find any info online about where Monster manufactures its headphones, it's statistically probable that they're made in China (maybe not literal rebrands of existing Chinese-made headphones, though, so I'll concede that point).

Whether or not they're "crap" is subjective, but if Monster's cables are any indication, their price is likely not consistent with their quality.

They aren't. Neither were they invented by Dr. Dre. They were developed in SF, at Ammunition Group LLC.

Dont you mean the image of Beats was developed by Ammunition Group, and then slapped on Monster headphones?

Do you mean to tell me that the headphones were not personally made by Dr Dre? They partnered with Monster as unsurprising a rapper might know what he wants in headphones but doesn’t know how to actually manufacture them.

How is that different than slapping his name on a T-shirt and charging an even larger percentage markup?

One is against the law, the other isn’t.

I don’t think Soulja Boy has fans. He was basically a one hit wonder back in 2007 who couldn’t rap but had one catchy song.

Dr. Dre has been active for 30 years and produced for and rapped with a number of successful rappers including Eazy-E, Tupac, Snoop Dog, Ice Cube, 50 cent, and Eminem. To even think about putting him and Soulja Boy in the same sentence is crazy.

Yes, but those ranges have a high level of personal involvement and brand coherency, and are generally better quality. This is a lot more of a cheap opportunistic item.

So their marketing had its intended effects on you