Podcast Debuts Fall To Four-Year April Low, But Creators Keep Producing.

Podcasters who’ve already launched a show are keeping busy, but new data shows that fewer shows are making their debut. Listen Notes reports 9,484 new podcasts launched during April. That is the smallest number in more than a year as the month delivered the fewest number of April debuts in four years. Since 2026 began, Listen Notes says more than 63,000 new shows have launched around the globe.

Even as rollouts have slowed, podcasts that have already launched have been active. Listen Notes says 475,069 shows have already published an episode this year. That compares to 268,820 for all of 2025. And the number of episodes that have been released worldwide is nearly 9.4 million.

The result is there are more than 3.7 million podcasts that have been launched, with more than 188 million episodes published.

Births may have slowed, but so too have deaths. The monthly update shows 6,639 podcasts are considered “dead” this year. At the current pace, that would put the year behind last year’s total of 30,505. Listen Notes considers a show to have “died” if the RSS feed of a podcast is deleted or its iTunes complete tag is a “yes.”

The rise of podcasts produced by generative AI has led to an ongoing effort by Listen Notes to scrub its database of AI-generated and low-quality “fake” podcasts. After a first quarter that saw a surge in removals, the company says the number of AI removals fell to 4,219 in April. That is the fewest since October.

In an explanation for how it decides on what to remove, Listen Notes says it leans into technology to seek out “authentic, human-crafted podcasts, not AI-generated junk.” It has developed an open-source tool to detect machine-generated audio content, including fake podcasts created by systems like NotebookLM. It also relies on human moderators who review every new podcast submission to ensure that it’s genuine and not spam.

“Keeping spam out of the database is a constant battle, especially as AI-generated content grows more sophisticated,” it says in a blog post. The company says most of the shows it removes come primarily via NotebookLM.