Yes, my analogy doesn't go too far. We're sentient coal, being fed bread and circuses as the trade-off for being burned away. We still have some choice, power, and control.
I don't care that maybe, just maybe, company X doesn't sell my personal information as a user of theirs to third parties (though I steadily doubt more and more about the claims of any company promising that it doesn't, and then there are also unintentional data leaks of things they supposedly don't keep stored) I also want goddam company X itself to not pry into my life so much just because I use a fucking pair of headphones or a blender, or a refrigerator or any number of other products that are being designed more often by the day to track everything you do with them and feed it all back to their creators. The sheer arrogance of the whole trend deserves much more criticism than it gets.
They may not, but Beats and Apple — the former is a subsidiary of the latter — lock one into a proprietary ecosystem in which your data is not your data (just try sharing iCloud photos with Android users), you have no right to run, view, modify or share the software you depend on, your message security rests 100% on the corporate goodwill of Apple and any government which can force Apple to do its will (your iMessages are end-to-end encrypted … to whatever keys Apple says belong to your correspondents; Apple can add new keys at will). And of course Apple are also doing their best to replace the standard headphone jack with crufty, battery-draining, CPU-requiring Bluetooth.
Headphones capable of running Bluetooth are headphones capable of collecting data about you, because they need some sort of processor to speak the Bluetooth protocol. Headphones which are composed of wire and drivers aren't capable of anything other than playing or receiving audio.