November Sees Fewest 2025 Show Launches Amid Record Activity Across Podcasting.

The seasonal slowdown in new podcast launches in November brought the fewest debuts of any month in 2025, according to Listen Notes. The podcast database and search engine says it detected 11,201 new podcasts last month, a decline of 5,000 from the prior month. It is also nearly half as many as the 20,201 new shows that debuted last January.

The downturn had been expected. The end of the year has typically brought fewer show launches in recent years, with January and February often the most robust months on the release calendar. Overall, Listen Notes says it has tracked 184,114 new show launches this year. That is the fewest since 2017 when 132,343 podcasts launched.

The number of active shows — a measure seen by many as the best measure of industry health — shows that 2025 is one of the record books. With under a month to go, Listen Notes says 647,632 shows have been active around the world this year. That tops the previous record year of 2020, when the pandemic led to 594,343 shows being active.

The number of so-called “dead” shows has also dropped dramatically with the smallest numbers in a decade. Listen Notes pegs the number of shows that have died this year at 26,611. It considers a show to have died when the RSS feed is deleted, or its iTunes “Completed” tag is marked “yes” by the publisher.

The latest update shows that there are 3,679,510 podcasts created to date worldwide overall. They have released a combined 188 million episodes. Two-thirds of podcasts, or 2.3 million, have come from the U.S., with no other country coming close. Second place Brazil has generated just 208,000 shows to date, according to Listen Notes. The result is six in ten podcasts created are in English, while 11% are in Spanish.