Podcast Listeners Can't Get Enough Crime

Apple Music , Apple Podcasts and Spotify released their year-end charts this week to give us a sense of what people have been consuming in music and podcasts in this glorious year of 2023. On the music front, Miley Cyrus’ song Flowers was big on both platforms, as was SZA’s Kill Bill. Apple Music saw more hip-hop tracks chart in its top 10 song list than Spotify, as well as J-pop artists. Interestingly, Morgan Wallen’s Last Night was the No.1 song. It didn’t even make it onto Spotify’s top 10.

Ashley Carman at Bloomberg drilled down on the podcast charts, particularly Apple Podcasts’ “ Top New Shows .” The company determines these rankings through a mix of how many followers a show receives, the number of listens it has and the completion rate of episodes.

Here’s that list:

1. 
   Scamanda
2. The Retrievals
3. The Deck Investigates
4. Murder & Magnolias
5. Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
6. The Girl in the Blue Mustang
7. The Coldest Case in Laramie
8. Murder in Apartment 12
9. The Girlfriends
10. Undetermined

Nine out of 10 shows fall under the true-crime category, and 30% come from NBC’s Dateline. (On Spotify, Dateline NBC came in as the 20th most popular show in the US based on the number of unique listeners that consumed at least two minutes or 50% of an episode.)

The people have spoken: they can’t get enough of murders and scams, according to Carman.

Carman chatted with Liz Cole, who oversees the audio unit of NBC News Studios and is the executive producer of Dateline, to get a sense of how she and the team think about competition in the cutthroat space and what makes for a worthwhile story.

“I think that what we look for in the original podcasts is not dissimilar from what we look for in original television,” she said.

For one, a podcast story must have “some degree of suspense or something unexpected happening” and “people or situations that listeners or viewers can relate to about human relationships.”

Critically, for audio, a story has to hold up over a handful of hours, rather than 60 or so minutes of TV programming. This, in the true-crime space, might translate to multiple suspects or “different investigative avenues to pursue,” she said.

Cole said her team promotes the programming across all NBC properties, including on the Today show, on NBC News and on the social feeds for Dateline. iHeartMedia promotes its podcasts on the radio. Wondery recently launched three Freevee channels dedicated to podcasts channels and Max bookends its TV programming with ads for companion podcasts.

With years oft-true-crime hype behind us, one may wonder if listeners will ever feel satiated with the amount of gruesome stories they’ve heard and tap out. According to the Apple Podcasts’ data, that day has not yet come.

So while podcast-industry watchers might roll their eyes at the prospect of yet another true-crime series, people simply can’t get enough.