More than 600,000 podcasts were active in 2025: “The most ever,” states report

The number of new podcasts launched ticked slightly higher in 2025 compared to a year earlier, but the biggest headline was the record number of active shows, reports InsideRadio.

Listen Notes, states InsideRadio, “says 602,892 podcasts were active in 2025 — the most ever, as nearly one of every five shows ever released published an episode in the past year. The podcast database and search engine’s tally shows the increase was not only more than double the nearly 227,000 active podcasts in 2024, but the total also surpassed the heights recorded during the flood of new shows during the pandemic when roughly 590,000 active shows were logged.

“On the flipside, Listen Notes says there were also fewer “dead” shows in 2025. Last year, it says that 27,459 series were dark. That was the fewest in a decade. 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 as more shows were considered active last year, 2025 brought a smaller number of episodes published overall. Listen Notes counts 26.3 million episodes published worldwide. That was down from 27.6 million a year earlier. The high point remains 2020, when a flood of new shows resulted in 31.1 million published episodes.”