The fewest podcasts launched last year since 2017 with only about a fifth as many shows debuting during 2024 as during the pandemic-fueled peak year of 2020. The count from Listen Notes shows 184,603 new podcasts dropped an inaugural episode last year, which was a 21% decline from 2023 when 232,670 shows launched. It continues a multi-year trend of fewer show launches.
December is typically a lighter month for new shows to launch, and last month saw the smallest number for all of last year — a similar trend seen in 2023. Listen Notes says there were 9,944 debuts during December.
Across last year, each quarter saw fewer launches, with last January seeing the most during 2023 with 21,323 new shows. That was the same pattern as seen in each of the two prior years, as the fourth quarter had the fewest launches of any quarter in each of the past two years. During Q4, Listen Notes says a total of 38,313 new podcasts debuted worldwide.
The further maturation of the podcast industry suggests active shows, not new podcast debuts, may be a better metric on which to measure the industry’s health. By that metric, 2024 was an extremely healthy year.
Listen Notes says there were 598,081 active podcasts last year. That is a 128% increase in the number of active shows vs. 2023 when 260,690 shows were considered active. It is also a three-year high as the number reached its highest level since 2021, when the pandemic resulted in a flood of new show debuts.
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 27,356 died. That is the smallest number since 2015, and it is a 45% year-to-year decline. To put that into perspective, at the peak new show frenzy, the total number of shows that died in 2020 and 2021 was around 150,000.
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.
Even while 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 26.8 million episodes were released, a 10% drop from the 29.8 million episodes released during 2023. It was also the fewest number of episode releases since 2019, when 18.6 million were published by podcasters.
Overall, Listen Notes says there are at least 3,474,361 podcasts and 168,617,181 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.
The year-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 shows 11% of shows were in Spanish, and 6% were 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 (9.3%), Arts (9.1%), Religion & Spirituality (8.3%), 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 at year-end Spotify’s Anchor FM is the most used hosting platform, representing 56% of all podcasts. Buzzsprout is a distant second at 6%, followed by SoundCloud, Spreaker and Podbean, each with a 4% share, and Libsyn with a 3% share of the hosting business.
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