First-Quarter Active Shows Pop While Overall New Show Launches Slip From A Year Ago.

The number of new podcasts launching during the first quarter declined 2% from a year ago, despite January seeing the strongest pace of debuts since March 2024. Listen Notes reports there were 46,941 podcasts launched during the first three months of this year. The first quarter is typically one of the strongest periods for debuts, and at the current pace the total number of launches would be on par with last year’s debuts.

The number of new show debuts slid during each month of the quarter, falling from 18,678 in January to 16,301 in February and 11,962 in March. It is a pattern seen in years past.

Listen Notes, the podcast search engine and database, says there are at least 3.5 million podcasts that have been launched over the years. Those shows have dropped more than 174 million episodes. So far this year, the total number of episodes has climbed nearly 6.3 million — or about 2.9% of the total number. That pace is lower than the number of episodes released last year.

While overall launches offer a snapshot of creator interest worldwide, many podcasters believe a better metric of industry health is the number of active shows. With just one quarter under 2025’s belt, the numbers show a medium that is continuing to grow. Listen Notes reports that 434,799 podcasts have been active so far this year, representing about 13% of all shows. Listen Notes gives the active show label to a podcast if the latest episode of a podcast is published in a specific year.

More notable is that the number of active shows this year already surpasses the 303,044 total recorded during 2024. The last time there were so many active podcasts was during the pandemic boom of 2020 and 2021, when the total topped 600,000.

Unlike the immediate years following the pandemic boom when the number of so-called “dead” podcasts soared, today fewer launches mean untimely ends to shows. During the first quarter, Listen Notes said 4,507 podcasts worldwide joined the ranks of dead shows. But that was fewer than the 4,472 shows that passed on during the same period a year ago.

Listen Notes data also shows that during all last year there were 33,215 dead podcasts, which was just a fraction of the more than 150,000 podcasts that came to an end during 2020 and 2021. Listen Notes considers a show to have died when the RSS feed is deleted, or its iTunes “completed” tag is marked “yes” by the publisher.

Listen Notes has in recent months undertaken a new effort to remove from its listings AI-generated podcasts that it considers fake. It reports it scrubbed the most fake listings to date during March, when 2,600 shows were removed from its database. That was the largest single-month removal to date, and it has brought the first-quarter fake show tally to 6,967.

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, are low-quality feeds such as those with no episodes or just a test clip, AI-generated audio, and non-audio RSS fees containing only PDFs.

Two-thirds of all podcasts at the end of the first quarter originated in the U.S. Listen Notes tabulates 61% were in English. That was steady compared with a year earlier. The tally shows 11% of shows were in Spanish, and 6% were in Portuguese — a figure reflecting the continued growth of the Brazilian podcast market. Rounding out the top five languages were Indonesian (4%) and German (3%) as the podcast language order has remained the same for the past five years.

The top genre remained Society & Culture during 2024, which represented 14% of all shows. It is followed by Education (12.7%), Business (9.4%), Arts (9%), Religion & Spirituality (8.4%), Comedy (6.7%), 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 that at year-end Spotify’s Anchor FM is the most used hosting platform, representing 55% of all podcasts. Buzzsprout is a distant second at 7%, followed by Spreaker, Podbean, and SoundCloud, each with a 4% share, and Libsyn with a 3% share of the hosting business.