The genre is old: crime pamphlets and execution ballads circulated in Britain from the 1550s, and In Cold Blood made the book-length form commercially serious in 1965. But its current scale dates to 2014, when Serial reached five million downloads on iTunes faster than any podcast before it and eventually passed 340 million. Making a Murderer followed in 2015 and pulled streaming money in behind it; by 2020 true crime held three of the top fifty US podcast slots. The audience is lopsided in a way that shapes the objections. Women made up 73% of digital true-crime podcast consumers in 2019, and researchers have repeatedly found listeners describing the appeal in practical terms (learning to recognise danger) rather than as entertainment. The criticism is equally concrete. Families of victims report being re-traumatised by portrayals they did not consent to and cannot stop, and a 2011 Nebraska study linked consumption to heightened fear of crime and shifted attitudes to criminal justice. The split is between people who treat the genre as useful and people who treat it as someone's worst day sold as a format.