That’s the podcast we should have launched with them. “I wish I had been involved in the ‘Meghan and Harry leave Spotify’ negotiation,” Simmons said on his own podcast days ago. The most brutal postmortem came from a current Spotify executive, the podcasting superstar and Ringer founder Bill Simmons, who also holds the title of head of podcast innovation and monetization at Spotify. Reached for comment, reps for Spotify and Archewell reiterated the earlier announcement of a mutual parting.) The Wall Street Journal’s sources indicated that Spotify hadn’t renewed Meghan’s Archetypes podcast, of which there are only 12 episodes to date, and that the couple hadn’t “met the productivity benchmarks required to receive the full payout from the deal.” The audio-industry briefing Podnews reported that “some interviews on the show were done by other staffers, with questions edited-in afterwards.” (A source familiar with the Archewell deals said Meghan conducted all of the primary-guest interviews, like those with the Mariah Careys and Mindy Kalings of the world interviews with secondary voices for certain episodes were handled by a producer, which is not an unheard-of practice.) A former Spotify executive, reacting to the notion that Harry and Meghan earned more from Spotify than the company’s most-streamed song ever, remarked to BBC Radio 4, “Not bad for 12 hours’ work.” (I’m told Harry and Meghan pitched show concepts and acquisitions that Spotify didn’t move forward with the Obamas, as I previously reported, shared a similar frustration before they left Spotify for Audible. But press reports about the breakup haven’t exactly worked in Harry and Meghan’s favor. You could chalk it up to Spotify’s big reorganization as it grapples with a broader market correction in the high-dollar podcasting space. But by now, anyone who may have been expecting a full-on smorgasbord of Harry-and-Meghan–curated content, under the auspices of Archewell Productions, has probably moderated their expectations.Ī whoosh of air came rushing out of the balloon last week when it was announced that Harry/Meghan and Spotify had “mutually agreed” to bail on the $20 million partnership they’d consummated back in 2020. Yes, the Sussexes’ drama-filled autobiographical docuseries last December was Netflix’s highest-viewed documentary debut on record, giving tens of millions of viewers something to love-hate as they closed out 2022. Yes, Harry published a blockbuster, sales-record-busting memoir with the help of an A-list ghostwriter, earning himself the type of press blitz that most authors would kill for. Media analyst Rich Greenfield echoed that sentiment, saying, “I think this clearly shows, whatever their profile was beforehand in the US and globally, it’s clearly that much larger now.” A Hollywood source concurred: “I think the crossover appeal-Black Lives Matter meets The Crown-is a fever pitch opportunity.”Ī little more than two years later, it’s fair to say the jury is still out. “They reached a whole new audience who now can’t wait to see what happens next,” the veteran royal chronicler Tina Brown told me at the time. In early 2021, after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sat for a bombshell Oprah interview on the heels of their megawatt deals with Netflix and Spotify, the spitball-attracting royals seemed poised to become media machers in their own right.
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