From Prince Harry’s deluded plan to interview Putin to
a Meghan Markle podcast so insufferable Taylor Swift refused to appear, it’s
been one disaster after another. No wonder they’ve been canned
Stuart
Heritage
@stuheritage
Wed 28 Jun
2023 10.29 BST
By and
large, if there is one thing that the world absolutely does not need any more
of, it’s podcasts. And yet the death of Prince Harry and the Duchess of
Sussex’s Spotify deal – as public and messy as it was – has by all accounts
deprived us of an absolute corker.
Last week,
Bloomberg reported that one podcast idea seriously mooted by Harry was to make
an entire series about childhood trauma. Not just his own trauma, because he
has obviously got enough mileage out of that elsewhere, but the trauma of a
group best described as “world baddies”. As Bloomberg wrote, the concept of the
show was as follows: “Harry would interview a procession of controversial
guests, such as Vladimir Putin, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump, about their
early formative years and how those experiences resulted in the adults they are
today.”
This is the
best idea in all of history – convincing a fleet of powerful and dangerous men
to abandon every instinct that brought them to power in the first place, so
that they can discuss how sad they are about never being hugged by their
fathers, with Prince Harry, for a podcast. Sadly, perhaps because Vladimir
Putin has been too busy threatening the world with nuclear annihilation to
discuss how badly he got bullied at school, the project came to naught.
Of course,
it was inevitable that Harry’s bad ideas would eventually leak to the press,
after Spotify executive Bill Simmons teased some of them on air recently.
Labelling Harry and Meghan as a pair of “fucking grifters”, Simmons said: “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.”
The tragedy
is, though, that the news of these terrible ideas got lost in the din of other
people rushing to trash the couple. As well as Simmons, Jeremy Zimmer – chief
executive of the United Talent Agency – mentioned the collapse of the deal
during an advertising festival in Cannes, saying “Turns out Meghan Markle was
not a great audio talent, or necessarily any kind of talent. And, you know,
just because you’re famous doesn’t make you great at something.” Taylor Swift
was apparently unimpressed enough at Meghan’s Archetypes podcast that she
reportedly turned down a personal invitation to appear on the show.
And then,
just to heap even more on top, Netflix is apparently getting ready to give
Harry and Meghan the chop, refusing to pay them tens of millions of dollars
unless they came up with a hit as successful as their recent six-part
documentary. Which they won’t, presumably, because that documentary was
literally the sum total of their entire lives. Also, it doesn’t help that their
other ideas don’t sound particularly compelling; one is a reimagining of Great
Expectations where Miss Havisham is now “a strong woman living in a patriarchal
society,” and another is described as “Emily in Paris, but about a man.”
Their
current woes, it seems, come from giving up the good stuff too early. As an
entity, Harry and Meghan are only interesting for as long as they can destabilise
the monarchy. Their Oprah interview did that. Their documentary did that.
Harry’s book Spare did that. Archetypes did not do that, and as such was
roughly as interesting as listening to changing-room chatter in the world’s
most insufferable yoga studio. As such, it is increasingly clear that only
fumes are left in the tank. It might be time for Harry and Meghan to go away
for a while and work out who they actually want to be now.
This isn’t
to say that we should write them off, of course. The Duchess of Sussex has
signed with a talent agency and, depending on who you listen to, either wants
to revive her blog as a Goop-style wellness hub or become US president. Any of
these ventures might boost the family coffers, something that would give Harry a
bit more freedom to go and chase down Putin for that interview.
Spotify executive calls Harry and Meghan
‘grifters’ after podcast deal ends
Bill Simmons, head of podcast innovation and
monetisation at Spotify, spoke out after the couple’s $20m deal with the
company ended prematurely
Sian Cain
@siancain
Mon 19 Jun
2023 05.31 BST
Spotify’s
head of podcast innovation and monetisation has labelled Prince Harry and
Meghan, Duchess of Sussex “grifters” after their $20m, multi-year deal to make
podcasts with the streaming platform came to an end after they made just 12
episodes.
Ringer
podcast network founder Bill Simmons – who sold his company to Spotify for
$196m in 2020 and gained a leadership role at the company in the deal –
criticised Harry and Meghan on his own podcast, following the announcement that
the Sussexes’ audio production company, Archewell, had severed ties with
Spotify. The couple signed a $20m deal with Spotify in 2020.
The
Archetypes podcast, which was hosted by Meghan, featured conversations with
friends and celebrities including Serena Williams, Mariah Carey and Trevor
Noah. It topped the podcast charts for Spotify in a number of markets, but only
12 episodes were made.
Last week,
Spotify and Archewell Audio released a joint statement saying they had
“mutually agreed to part ways and are proud of the series we made together”.
However, sources close to Spotify have said the royal couple did not meet the
productivity benchmark required to receive the full headline payout from the
deal, having only produced one 12-episode series, the Wall Street Journal
reported.
“I wish I
had been involved in the ‘Meghan and Harry leave Spotify’ negotiation. ‘The
Fucking Grifters.’ That’s the podcast we should have launched with them,”
Simmons said on his podcast, the Bill Simmons podcast. “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.”
The
Guardian has approached Archewell for comment.
Simmons had
previously said he was annoyed he had to “share” Spotify with Prince Harry.
In a
January 2022 episode of his podcast, he said: “You live in fucking Montecito
and you just sell documentaries and podcasts and nobody cares what you have to
say about anything unless you talk about the royal family and you just complain
about them.”
Spotify’s
deals with Simmons and the Duke and Duchess were a part of the company’s
expansion into podcasting, after its success with Joe Rogan. However, the
Stockholm-based streaming company is now facing investor pressure to improve
its performance after making a net loss of €430m (£367m) last year.
Earlier
this year, Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek admitted that the company had made
some mistakes with the $1bn spent in its push to establish itself as a key
player in podcasting.
“You’re
right in calling out the overpaying and overinvesting,” he told financial
analysts on a conference call.
“We’re
going to be very diligent in how we invest in future content deals,” he added.
“And the ones that aren’t performing, obviously, we won’t renew.
“And the
ones that are performing, we will obviously look at those on a case-by-case
basis on the relative value.”
Earlier
this month, Spotify announced it would be making 200 job cuts in its podcasting
business.
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