However, getting into Apple Podcasts is needlessly complicated and requires a credit card. They don’t publish this figure, but it’s calculated by Daniel J Lewis’s Podcast Industry Stats website.

That’s probably around 2.4m currently (in Mar 2022).

What most people think of as the definitive number of podcasts is the total Apple Podcasts catalogue. The Podcast Index doesn’t include all podcasts that are out there, since it removes open RSS feeds that are really designed to be private, and also removes a number of dormant podcasts. What’s quite fun for journalists is that you can download the database in its entirety and play with it to pull data out of it. They claim they have 4.2m podcasts in their index (in Mar 2022). The Podcast Index is built from (in the main) discovering open podcast RSS feeds on the web.

Spotify’s catalogue includes some exclusive shows that aren’t available as open RSS feeds. You have to submit your podcast to Spotify, but it’s a relatively simple process. Spotify suggest they have 3.6m podcasts on their platform (in Mar 2022). How many podcasts are there? That’s not quite as simple to answer as you might think - we should have a discussion about what the definition is of a podcast before we can really give an answer of how many there are.

Spotify podcasts stats