Podcast Activity Soars As Active Podcasts Hit Record High In 2025.

The number of active podcasts continues to climb higher, with Listen Notes reporting it tallies 605,122 shows that have released an episode this year. That’s an increase of 15,000 from the end of August. The count of active shows — considered by many to be the true measure of industry health — has now reached record levels, overtaking the peak activity levels in the pandemic-fueled years when a rush of new shows debuted.

The latest Listen Notes data shows 2025 has overtaken the record of 595,514 active shows set in 2020. It means nearly one in five (17%) of the podcasts in its global database have released an episode this year.

The number of so-called “dead” shows has also dropped dramatically during the past five years. Through the first three quarters of the year, Listen Notes says it has moved 18,714 shows into that classification. That is fewer than half the 42,289 podcasts it says passed last year. And it is considerably under the 157,000 that died in both 2020 and 2021. 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, overall, there are 3.6 million podcasts created to date worldwide. They have released a combined 185 million episodes. Two-thirds, or 2.3 million, have come from the U.S., with no other country coming close. Second place Brazil has generated just 207,000 shows to date, according to Listen Notes. The result is six in ten podcasts created are in English, while 11% are in Spanish.

The number of new show launches has continued to shrink throughout 2025, and it fell to its lowest point yet in September. That is when Listen Notes says it detected 13,090 shows. That was the fewest number of debuts since last December, and the total was down from 14,715 in August.

The upshot of less shows is that it also means the need to remove fewer AI-generated “fake” podcasts from its database last month. It says it deleted 3,769 such shows during September, down from 4,163 in August. It says 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 latest update shows Anchor.fm remains the most-used podcast hosting service, with 55% of shows in the Listen Notes database using its service. It is followed by Buzzsprout (7%) and Spreaker (4%).