Podcast Debuts Hit Lull In August While Active Titles Double Year-Over-Year.

The number of new podcast launches dipped in August to the fewest debuts for a month since last autumn. The podcast search engine and database Listen Notes says it detected 14,037 new podcasts last month. That was down from 15,089 in July as the summer months typically see a slower pace of launches. The August addition brought the number of new show launches to 140,120 for the year.

The number of active podcasts continues to be larger than a year ago, with the figure seen by many as the true measure of industry health, as well as the true competition that creators encounter. Listen Notes says 589,210 shows have released an episode this year. That is more than double the number of active shows in each of the last three years.

Meantime, the number of episodes released this year continues to climb higher with the more than 18 million episodes published to date. Overall, Listen Notes data shows there are at least 3.6 million podcasts and 183 million episodes available to listeners.

It also says 17,366 podcasts have “died” this year, the smallest number in a decade. It considers a show to have died when the RSS feed is deleted, or its iTunes “Completed” tag is marked “yes” by the publisher.

Podcasters have been zeroing in on shows produced by AI in the days since the spotlight was focused on the podcast production company Inception Point AI. It is using AI to create a vast number of shows, with its Quiet Please Podcast Network reportedly releasing more than 5,000 shows to date.

Listen Notes has begun removing AI-generated “fake” podcasts from its database during the past year. It says it deleted 4,107 such shows last month. 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.