Number Of Active Podcasts Hits All-Time High In 2025.

The number of new podcasts launched ticked slightly higher in 2025 compared to a year earlier, but the biggest headline was the record number of active shows. Listen Notes says 602,892 podcasts were active in 2025 — the most ever, as nearly one of every five shows ever released published an episode in the past year. The podcast database and search engine’s tally shows the increase was not only more than double the nearly 227,000 active podcasts in 2024, but the total also surpassed the heights recorded during the flood of new shows during the pandemic when roughly 590,000 active shows were logged.

On the flipside, Listen Notes says there were also fewer “dead” shows in 2025. Last year, it says that 27,459 series were dark. That was the fewest in a decade. Listen Notes considers a show to have died when the RSS feed is deleted, or its iTunes “Completed” tag is marked “yes” by the publisher.

Even as more shows were considered active last year, 2025 brought a smaller number of episodes published overall. Listen Notes counts 26.3 million episodes published worldwide. That was down from 27.6 million a year earlier. The high point remains 2020, when a flood of new shows resulted in 31.1 million published episodes.

Last year’s activity helped to build on a foundation that was already sizable. Listen Notes’ latest tally shows there are at least 3,696,638 podcasts that have been created globally. Those shows have released at least 189,822,275 episodes.

As the podcast industry continues to grapple with how to classify artificial intelligence-generated shows, Listen Notes has been actively stepping up its scrubbing of many AI-produced podcasts from its database. It removed another 4,228 last month, bringing the total for the year to 48,365 podcasts classified as “fake.” Listen Notes has previously said the “podcasts” were predominantly created using Google’s Notebook LM and are “not designed for human consumption.”

Listen Notes relies on automated scripts and human moderators to clean its data and make needed adjustments to account for podcasts that were long ago deleted, have low quality such as feeds with no episodes or just a test clip, AI-generated audio, and non-audio RSS feeds containing only PDFs.

The year-end tally shows two-thirds of podcasts continue to come from the U.S., with Brazil’s 6% share making it a distant second. The result is six in ten podcasts (61%) are in English, a figure helped by the UK market, which represents about 2% of podcasts published. The tally reveals that 11% of shows were in Spanish and 6% in Portuguese — a figure reflecting what Listen Notes says is Brazil releasing more podcasts than any country other than the U.S. Rounding out the top five languages were Indonesian (4%) and German (3%) in a ranking that is also on par with a year earlier.

The top genre in 2025 remained Society & Culture, which represented 14% of all shows. It is followed by Education (12.7%), Business (9.5%), Arts (8.9%), Religion & Spirituality (8.4%), Health & Fitness (6.6%), Comedy (6.5%), News (5.2%), Leisure (4.9%), Sports (4.3%), Music (4.3%), TV & Film (2.9%), Technology (2.5%), Kids & Family (2.3%), and Science (2.1%).

Listen Notes also says at year-end Spotify’s Anchor FM is the most used hosting platform, representing 56% of all podcasts. Buzzsprout is a distant second at 7%, followed by Spreaker, Podbean and SoundCloud, each with a 4% share, and Libsyn with a 3% share of the hosting business.