Podcast Boom: Active Podcasts Numbers Are Soaring In 2025.

The number of active podcasts has more than doubled the rate of all last year, as mid-year data from Listen Notes shows 533,943 shows have released an episode since the start of 2025. That is more than double the 259,371 active shows the podcast search engine logged in 2024.

The numbers show that 2025 has already had the most activity seen since the peak pandemic years when a rush of new podcasts pushed the number active shows to just under 600,000. If the current pace of new show launches holds steady, it could mean the industry will see a record amount of episode releases from podcasters. In the meantime, the data shows more creators have already published more episodes this year than the last two combined.

Listen Notes says 101,957 new podcasts debuted during the first half of the year. In what has become a familiar pattern, the number of launches is the greatest at the beginning of the year and then trails off as the summer months draw closer. The latest data shows 13,786 podcasts launched worldwide in June, a 17% decline from a month earlier. The biggest number of debuts recorded this year came in January, when the search engine detected 19,551 new shows.

Hand in hand with the increase in the number of active shows is the continued decline of so-called dead shows. Last year, Listen Notes says 39,398 died. That was the smallest number since 2016. To put that into perspective, at the peak new show frenzy, the total number of shows that died in 2020 and 2021 was around 156,000 each year.

This year, Listen Notes has classified 13,372 podcasts as having died as the pace is even slower than a year ago. It 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 the number of active shows more than doubled last year, the data suggests some shows may have opted to release fewer episodes. Listen Notes says 13.2 million episodes were released during the first half of the year. That is slightly behind the 2024 pace, when 27.3 episodes were released during the entire year. But the coming months could see a lot of activity, so that gap may close by year-end.

Overall, Listen Notes says there are at least 3,593,490 podcasts and 179 million episodes in the world. 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, have low quality such as feeds with no episodes or just a test clip, AI-generated audio, and non-audio RSS fees containing only PDFs.

Listen Notes last year upped its transparency to detail how many AI-generated fake shows it is removing from the database each month. In June, that number totaled 4,168. That sets a record for the most AI-generated shows detected since it began the effort.

The mid-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 2024 remained Society & Culture, which represented 14% of all shows. It is followed by Education (12.7%), Business (9.5%), Arts (9%), Religion & Spirituality (8.3%), Comedy (6.6%), Health & Fitness (6.5%), News (5.2%), Leisure (4.9%), Music (4.4%), Sports (4.4%), TV & Film (3%), Technology (2.5%), Kids & Family (2.2%), and Science (2.1%).

Listen Notes also says at mid-year Spotify’s Anchor FM is the most used hosting platform, representing 55% of all podcasts. Buzzsprout is a distant second at 7%, followed by SoundCloud, Spreaker and Podbean, each with a 4% share, and Libsyn with a 3% share of the hosting business.