Perplexing stories. Gore. Mystery. And Airpods in. Within the last few years, podcast listening, especially the True Crime genre, has become a dominant medium, trending across the United States and gaining interest.
Podcast usage has been trending for a while now. An average of 14 million weekly unique users listened to podcasts in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, in contrast to just 2 million in 2014.
For Aisling Figureoa, avid listener of “The American Life,” a True Crime podcast from Apple. “Podcasts are a great way to learn new things or produce new mindsets so I try to listen to podcasts in the morning before work”.
The rise in podcast listening, however, may not be random. In “The Rise of Storytelling as the New Marketing”, an analysis article by Joe Pullizi, CEO of the Content Marketing Institute states, “content marketing [is] the idea that storytelling is key to attract and retain customers”.
Audiences, however, have varying tastes and affinities in terms of the podcast genre they listen to. According to a graph presented by Statista, “Leading podcast genres in the United States in October 2020”, the top genres, ranked by percentage share of weekly listeners, were 1) Comedy - leading with 22%, 2) News - 21%, 3) True Crime - 18%, and 4) 17% for Sports and 5)Health and Fitness.
One of the buzziest genres of the audio-based industry is True Crime. True Crime is a non-fictional genre that reviews the events, facts, stories, and various accounts within a criminal case or murder, often unsolved. Audiences of True Crime podcasts, in turn, can piece together the details of the case and determine for themselves what really happened.
Figureoa is a fan of the “American Life” podcast from Apple. She “love[s] investigative journalism and this podcast is great because they go in deep and try to really pull the humanity out of people”.
Audiences around the country and the world have tuned into various True Crime podcasts including “Crime Junkie” hosted by Ashley Flowers, “Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo”, following the disappearance of Cleo Nicotine Semaganis in the seventies, and “Murder in Illinois”, tracking the murder of the Vaughn family.
And it appears the True Crime obsession and genre is not slowing down. On Wednesday, February 2, podcaster Ashley Flower launched a second True Crime podcast, “The Deck”. “The Deck” will “host Ashley Flowers deals listeners into an investigation with the help of detectives and victims’ loved ones revealing key facts about some of America’s coldest cases”, according to Sirius XM, the host company of the new podcast.
Yet, True Crime is only a part of the larger entity of podcasting that continues to grow exponentially. In fact, eMarketer and Business Insider Intelligence, report that there will be 131.2 podcast listeners in the United States, about 38.6% of the U.S. population by 2023. For the case of podcasting, there’s no mystery or surprise here as many Americans are tuning in.
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