Meghan and Harry: the end of their $20m Spotify deal

“When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex announced their $20m, multi-year deal with Spotify in 2020, it was hailed as the centrepiece of the couple’s growing business empire,” said Nadia Khomami in The Guardian.

Last week, however, news broke that the partnership was coming to an end. The decision was described as mutual, but insiders reported that the couple had failed to meet a “productivity benchmark”, and would not be getting the full payment.

In other words, said Reaction, Spotify had looked at their total output – 12 episodes of Meghan’s dreary Archetypes podcast, in which she interviewed some of her famous friends about the “labels that hold women back” – and concluded that it just wasn’t good enough. One senior executive went rather further, by implying that the couple had conned the firm. Speaking on his own podcast, Bill Simmons declared that Meghan and Harry should have produced a show called “The F**king Grifters”.

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To be fair, this isn’t just about the Sussexes, said James Warrington in The Daily Telegraph. It’s also “the latest sign that Spotify’s big bet on podcasting has gone sour”. Four years ago, the music-streaming giant started splurging millions on headline-grabbing podcast deals, hoping that “ad dollars would follow”.

It even created a dedicated campus in LA called Pod City. But the expected revenue hasn’t materialised, and it is now laying off staff and rethinking expensive deals. Signing the Sussexes generated useful media buzz, but relative to other podcasters, Meghan produced very little content, and seems not to have hauled in the listeners: having initially topped the charts, her series is no longer even in the top 100.

That doesn’t surprise me, said James Marriott in The Times. In a market crowded with limp celebrity podcasts, the show was notably bad – the “distilled essence of purest Californian banality” – and Meghan was awful on it: she introduced fascinating guests, then covered them in “gush” (“you’re choosing liberation and newness; I love that so much”) until they became boring, which is “the opposite of good interviewing technique”.

Spotify doesn’t release listener figures, but my guess is that Archetypes’s were very low, and that is worrying for the Sussexes. They can’t keep droning on about the horrible royal family. What with Harry’s book and the Netflix documentary, it’s a story they’ve “milked to within an inch of its life”, and there are signs that people are getting tired of it. But the failure of Archetypes suggests that no one wants to listen to them talk about anything else.