If theres one thing Americans love to listen to, its true crime.
A new Pew Research study of the U.S. podcast market found that nearly a quarter of top-ranked titles in America focused on true crime stories. Moreover, 95% of these true crime podcasts use in-depth reporting to cover their topics, compared to other genres which are much lower (split roughly evenly between deep reporting, interviews and commentary).
After the crime podcast wave, genres thin out a bit: 10% focused on politics and government, 9% on entertainment, pop culture and arts and 8% on self-help and relationships. The rest covered a broad range of topics like comedy, religion, sports, health and money.
It seems American listeners want a lot of variety: one-fifth of the top podcasts didnt fit into one single category, and instead covered a more than one topic. In fact, no one genre accounted for more than a quarter of the podcasts.
When it comes to news, Pew found that not many Americans are reaching for their headphones. Only 15% of the top podcasts had a new focus and just 18% were affiliated with a news organization. Still, listeners reported that about two-thirds of adults have heard current events discussed at least once on a podcast theyve listened to in the last year.
Other highlights from the study:
Spotify came out on top in terms of accessibility, with 99% of the top podcasts available on their platform.
On average, top podcast episodes last more than 20 minutes but less than an hour.
The top-ranked podcasts typically release an episode once a week.
It was an equal toss up for video components: about half of podcasts had accompanying videos, and half did not.
About 70% of top podcasts are affiliated with a larger organization.
Around half of them seek audience support by offering paid subscriptions, selling merch or asking for donations.
The Pew Research study analyzed 451 podcasts from the average top 300 daily rankings on Spotify and Apple Podcasts U.S. from April to Sept. 2022.