Why did Harry and Meghan’s $20m podcast deal
collapse? Over to our anonymous experts …
Arwa
Mahdawi
Spotify’s Bill Simmons has described his former
colleagues as a pair of ‘grifters’. Other, unnamed commenters have been less
kind
Tue 20 Jun
2023 12.49 BST
Well,
that’s a wrap, then. Or is that the wrong terminology to use when talking about
podcasts, rather than movies? I’m afraid I’m not an expert on podcasting.
Neither, it seems, are Harry and Meghan. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, as the
pair still insist on being called, have parted ways with Spotify in
questionable circumstances.
A quick
recap: in 2020, Archewell Audio, the Sussexes’ podcast production company,
signed an exclusive, $20m deal with Spotify to produce “uplifting” audio
projects. Spotify made a lot of noise at the time about how proud it was to
partner with the pair and how wonderful and inspiring they were.
Now, less
than a year after the launch of Meghan’s debut podcast, Archetypes, the
partnership is over. The official line is that it was by mutual agreement and
everyone is terribly proud of what they have achieved. And, to be fair, Archetypes
– which featured Meghan interviewing famous women – was top of the podcast
charts in a lot of markets.
But while
it didn’t bomb, there may have been room for improvement. Various anonymous
sources have suggested the deal ended prematurely because the former royals
were spectacularly unproductive – it took them two years to release just 12
episodes. (Again, the podcast wasn’t in-depth reportage: it was Meghan going
through her address book and interviewing her contacts.) That said, another anonymous
source has suggested to Variety that rumours of the Sussexes being deathly lazy
are greatly exaggerated. According to this source, the couple wanted to move
away from exclusive Spotify distribution and on to more lucrative things.
Thankfully,
not everyone is keeping their views on the matter anonymous. “I wish I had been
involved in the ‘Meghan and Harry leave Spotify’ negotiation,” said Bill
Simmons, Spotify’s head of podcast innovation and monetisation, on his
eponymous podcast. “‘The Fucking Grifters’. That’s the podcast we should have
launched with them. I have got to get drunk one night and tell the story of the
Zoom I had with Harry to try and help him with a podcast idea. It’s one of my
best stories … Fuck them. The grifters.”
Look, it’s
important to enjoy alcohol responsibly, but, please, Mr Simmons, get drunk. Get
drunk and spill the tea! I’m begging you. Although, honestly, it doesn’t seem
as if he needs much encouragement. Simmons clearly isn’t Team Sussex. In a
January 2022 episode of his podcast, Simmons said of the pair: “You live in
fucking Montecito and … nobody cares what you have to say about anything unless
you talk about the royal family.”
It’s hard
to argue with that. I’m not saying Harry and Megan are dullards with nothing
interesting to talk about outside their dysfunctional family dynamics; it’s
just that when you are in the 0.0001%, it’s probably tough to come up with a
regular stream of content that is relatable to the masses. Take Ivanka Trump,
for example. At the beginning of the pandemic, she suggested people amuse
themselves during lockdown by “making shadow puppets from Henry Bursill’s
recently unearthed 1860s book of engraving”.
I know
schadenfreude is unbecoming, but I’ll admit I felt a little twinge of
satisfaction about Harry and Meghan’s podcasting career seemingly imploding.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult for normal people to make a sustainable
living in creative careers: a recent report found professional authors in the
UK earn a median of just £7,000 a year. Every week, there seems to be a new
round of redundancies in the media.
It’s
difficult, in this context, not to get annoyed when you see celebrities
nonchalantly wade into content creation as if anyone could do it. Pretty much
every celebrity seems to be writing children’s books (another Harry and Meghan
production), podcasting or getting commissions from magazines to interview
other celebrities. So it’s refreshing when you see some of these celebrities
realise that coming up with ideas consistently can be a royal pain.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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