Podcasting Thrives: Active Shows Double in 2025.

The number of new podcast launches last month held steady with June, despite the typical summer months slowdown, at least in the northern hemisphere, where the vast majority of shows still originate. Listen Notes says 14,163 podcasts debuted worldwide in July, which was slightly below the 14,332 that launched in June.

It brings this year’s total number of new shows to 116,671 through the end of July. That compares to 196,071 in all of 2024, according to Listen Notes’ tally. New show debuts have been trending lower since peaking at just over a million in 2020.

Listen Notes says there are at least 3.6 million podcasts and 181 million episodes that have ever been created. The podcast search engine’s most revealing data for 2025 remains, however, the number of active shows. The figure seen by many as the true measure of industry health, and the real competitive challenge, has jumped this year.

Listen Notes reports 556,139 podcasts have been active through the end of July. That is above the 252,693 titles that were active in all of 2024 — and it is the biggest number since the pandemic fueled industry growth. The two biggest years for show activity to date have been 2020 (596,580) and 2021 (594,868).

The latest update also shows 15.1 million episodes have been released by podcasters so far this year, which represents 6.7% of all episodes ever released. The current pace is also slightly ahead of last year, when 27.4 million episodes were published.

Listen Notes says 14,256 podcasts have died so far this year. It considers a show to have died when the RSS feed is deleted, or its iTunes “Completed” tag is marked “yes” by the publisher. If the current pace holds, it could mean 2025 will have the lowest number of podcast deaths in a decade.

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. Listen Notes last year upped its transparency to detail how many AI-generated fake shows it is removing from the database each month. In July, that number totaled 3,537.