According to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre, the majority of listeners to top-ranked podcasts in the United States are Latino and Black. Most of these podcasts include true crimes as their primary subject matter.
In the realm of true crime podcasts, there is a long-standing perception that the majority of the content is produced by white women, aimed at white women, and focused on white women. However, the results of a survey conducted by Pew throw a wrench into that preconception by indicating that, in reality, individuals of Hispanic and Black descent make up a bigger number of listeners of true crime podcasts.
According to a survey conducted in 2022 among more than 5,000 persons in the United States, over 43% of frequent fans of real crime are Latino and 36% are Black, while only 34% of fans are white. According to the results of the study, persons of Latino descent who self-identified as being of any race are included in the categories reserved for black and white adults.
According to the poll, women, and particularly women with lower educational attainment, are nearly twice as likely as males to frequently listen to true crime podcasts. This is especially true for women with lower educational achievement.
Nearly a quarter of all of the highest-rated podcasts are devoted to true crime stories, and they had the highest average daily rankings on Apple’s and Spotify’s lists of podcasts in 2022. This was the case for a period of six months.
In the previous year, among all of the adults in the United States who listened to a podcast, 34% reported doing so regularly to listen to podcasts on true crime.
Research in the field of sociology reveals that women, more so than males, consume true crime media due to the psychological component, because it teaches them strategies for self-preservation, and because the victims are more typically women. This is the case because women are more frequently the targets of violent crimes. Internet sleuths and true crime fans who took it upon themselves to investigate the abduction and death of Gabby Petito, who was 22 years old at the time, helped fuel a media frenzy that occurred in 2021 surrounding the disappearance and murder of the young woman.
The rise in popularity of true crime podcasts among listeners of Latino and Black descent has opened up a market that was previously unexplored by podcast producers.
MaRah and Taz are the co-hosts of a podcast called “Sistas Who Kill,” which focuses on crimes committed by Black women. Taz and MaRah are the hosts of the programme. They began the podcast in the midst of the pandemic and carved out a niche for themselves that allowed them to shed attention on racial discrepancies in how white women and Black women are treated in the legal system, both as victims and as perpetrators of crime.
