Image for article titled The coronavirus pandemic is changing which podcasts people are listening to

Coronavirus may not have changed the overall trajectory of podcasting, but it does seem to have affected what people are actually listening to. Podtrac, another podcast data firm, tracks podcast downloads by genre. For the shows Podtrac measures, which is a subset of the ones measured by Chartable, overall downloads by US listeners grew by 42% from October 2019 to October 2020. Yet there was a huge disparity across genres.

The popularity of news shows exploded. Shows like the New York Times “The Daily” and Vox’s “Today, Explained,” have seen huge jumps in downloads from people looking to understand the virus and its impacts.

Image for article titled The coronavirus pandemic is changing which podcasts people are listening to
Image for article titled The coronavirus pandemic is changing which podcasts people are listening to

The hardest hit genre has been “true crime.” The category grew 25% in from October 2019 to February 2020, but has seen no growth since March, around when the lockdowns happened.

True crime podcasts have been central to the podcasting boom since the success of the show “Serial” in 2014. It was one of the first podcasts to break out into the mainstream, and it has spawned many popular followers, like “My Favorite Murder” and “S-Town.” Though the chart above shows that “arts,” “education,” and “history” are growing even more slowly than true crime, unlike true crime, those genres were not growing quickly before Covid-19 emerged. It appears people are less interested in the dynamics of a grisly murder during a pandemic.

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