Fewer New Shows, But Podcast Activity Nears Pandemic Peaks.

The podcast directory Listen Notes says the number of active shows continues to outpace any previous years other than the pandemic peaks, and if current trendlines hold it could overtake those as well. Listen Notes reports that 475,893 podcasts have been active so far this year, representing about 14% of all shows. That is already more than the 281,714 shows that were active in all last year. Listen Notes gives the active show label to a podcast if the latest episode of a podcast is published in a specific year. The peak number of active shows were in 2020 and 2021, when just under 600,000 podcasts were considered active.

Most activity comes from existing shows, but new show launches help too. Listen Notes says 13,894 new podcasts launched worldwide last month, bringing the total number of debuts this year to 67,054. The number of April debuts declined 17% from a year earlier, as the month saw the fewest debuts so far in 2025, with each month so far this year delivering fewer debuts than the preceding month.

While show launches may be slower, there is no shortage of content. Listen Notes says nearly 8.8 million episodes have been released by podcasters around the globe during the first four months of the year. That’s actually ahead of 2024’s pace, when 27.8 million episodes were released for the entire year.

The number of so-called dead shows is also trending lower. Listen Notes says its tally of dead shows this year is 7,922 vs. 31,314 for all of 2024. The company considers a show dead if the RSS feed is deleted or its iTunes Complete tag is labeled “yes.”

Listen Notes has in recent months undertaken a new effort to remove from its listings AI-generated podcasts that it considers fake. It reports it scrubbed the most fake listings to date during April, when 2,497 shows were removed from its database. That was fewer than in March, the highpoint so far, when 3,013 shows were scrubbed.

Overall, Listen Notes says there are at least 3.55 million podcasts in the world, and more than 175 million episodes. Two-thirds have been launched in the U.S. and 61% of podcasts released are in English, according to its analysis.

The podcast search engine and database says it relies on automated scripts and human moderators to clean its data and make needed adjustments to account for podcasts that were long ago deleted, are low-quality feeds such as those with no episodes or just a test clip, AI-generated audio, and non-audio RSS fees containing only PDFs.