How many podcasts are there? A lot. And I mean A LOT.
If it seems like every second person has a podcast, you’re not far off.
According to Listen Notes, a podcast search engine and database, there are at least 3,747,726 podcasts available. Not all are active, but they’re out there. This does not include empty RSS feeds and AI-produced junk.
How many episodes are there to choose from? At last count in March 2026, 186,650,186.
The number of new podcasts has decreased over the years after setting an all-time high in 2020, thanks to the pandemic. More AI fake podcasts are coming, too, but there’s an effort to remove them from databases.
How does that compare to other media? IMDB has 22 million titles spread across movies and TV. Spotify has somewhere around 250 million tracks, and Audible offers 470,000 audio books.
The vast majority of podcasts (by at least a factor of four) are in English. Spanish-language podcasts come second, followed by Portuguese and Indonesian. The US is the overwhelming source of podcasts with Brazil a distant second.
What topics are the biggest? Society and culture leads the way, followed by education and business. Music is much further down the list than I expected.
