Prince Harry And Meghan Markle Part Ways With Spotify

The writing, in the form of high levels of doubt within the industry and without as to whether the "Archetypes" Spotify podcast put together and hosted by Meghan Markle had any legs, is now officially on the wall: Spotify and the Archewell principals Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, are walking away from their reported $20-million contract. Specifically, the series will not be renewed for a second season, a decision by Spotify, according to reports. No word yet on how much or how little Meghan Markle actually got for her dozen episodes over three years since the inking, but it is a fair bet that it does not begin to approach the reported contractual sum.

It also has been reported that the decision was a "mutual" one, as well as one taken exclusively by Spotify. The Montecito Windsors and their several new eagle-eyed public relations representatives would have insisted on that bit of spin for this news byte, to avoid the widely-held impression across broad swaths of the public and on the many backlots of Hollywood that the dozen occasionally puzzling episodes bore little driving magnetism or spark, to say nothing of demonstrating a valence that would grow a steady audience. Certainly, Spotify executive Bill Simmons pulled no punches on the matter in his own podcast, according to Variety.

In the first 18 months after the celebrated 2020 inking of the now-discarded paper, there was clearly a conceptual problem with the production, or possibly several of them. Behind the scenes, meaning, in Montecito and/or as the Archewell offices got up and running, there may well have been this or that idea floated, or this or that celebrity friend of the couple rung up and asked for an appearance. But the fact remains: For the first 18 months of the reported 3-year contract, nothing was aired.

In fairness to the Archewell principals, good things do take time, and in that particularly harsh, cutthroat terrain of content-land in which Prince Harry and Meghan Markle operate, namely, that of the personal narrative, finding the right tack for a bully pulpit such as an issues-oriented podcast can be tricky. The noble notion behind the podcast was to upend the conventional thinking on all sorts of 'archetypes' under which we labor, with a specific focus on archetypes of women.

In the episodes that were produced, the results feel somewhat rushed, but that can be chalked up to the relative lateness of their appearance in the contract's cycle. It also can well be that there was appropriately deep debate between Meghan Markle and her producers. We can certainly hope that that happened, but the evidence of it in the podcast content is thin.

Nevertheless: Whether the prospective chat-show host Meghan Markle was aware of it or not, the year-and-a-half delay until any product landed left Ms. Markle and Prince Harry with a great, Hydra-headed showbiz-startup disadvantage. That was: By beginning their Spotify odyssey at that late point, they severed their own audience-building ramp of time literally in half. Said another way, they left themselves with 50% less room for experimentation and, perhaps more critically, that much less room for nuanced course-correction in the always-uncertain search for audience. They're a savvy couple and will likely have absorbed the lesson to be quicker off the mark in their next audio endeavor.

The corollary disadvantages emanating from that Hydra head of having less time were, and are, deadly for any project with a hope to gain a following. If there's no time to find an audience, it can engender that the producers then lurch in many directions at once, madly casting broad nets of sub-topics and 'directions' for the conversations to take in an effort to rope in the greatest number of fish. That then leads to the problem as embodied by the episodes of 'Archetypes' that did make it to air: Since the conversations are about everything, all at once, the vehicle doesn't travel. It goes nowhere. Its stated journey becomes about nothing.

It’s hard not to read the announcement as a diminution of the Windsors' larger business efforts in media in southern California, and at the same time, as pertains to the upper-level management of Spotify charged with shepherding the couple's projects through the mill, it's difficult not to read into the non-renewal a significant quotient of relief. At least, that's the overriding public impression of the shuttering of the partnership. If that holds true, then that is a hit taken by the couple. Word has seeped out that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle would like to 'diversify' — in the sense of broadening — the platforms upon which they offer audio content. However much of a balm that may be on the current state of affairs, that's fair. They may have at or apply themselves to any platform that will have them after this — who knows, Lauren Sanchez may step off the Bezos superyacht in Portofino, decide to come out of retirement and sign them up for Amazon.

But the second rather deeper and more enduring architectural problem with "Archetypes" is one that, first, Britain and the British press — and increasingly, with the release of his as-to-to-'autobiography' Spare, the American press — have had with Prince Harry's and Meghan Markle's content for years now. The problem is that quite a lot of the narrative that they take to the market is about them.

There's a distinct limit to that narrative of oneself, and it is a highly fraught and nuanced one. Oscar Wilde and Samuel Clemens made a good go of it back in the day — we could even call their immensely popular readings and lectures an early form of highly literate and obviously highly literary standup. More recently in America, the late-20th-century re-inventors of daytime TV and shock-jock radio — approximately, Phil Donahue, Jerry Springer, Howard Stern and topping them all, the single most transformative empire-builder of the personal narrative herself, Oprah Winfrey, a personal friend and guardian angel of the Windsors of Montecito — staked out this rich territory and created an enormous appetite in America for just these sorts of narratives.

But whether we are talking about Oprah, Donahue, or even Jimmy Fallon or James Corden late at night, their lesson is a deceptively simple one: If you're going to make a business talking about yourself, or getting others to talk about themselves, you have to make sure that the door-policy of the nightclub you're opening is quite liberal, meaning, you can't afford to cherry-pick your clientele, at least not until things are up and running. Short and sweet: You have to be generous and invite everybody in. It's a basic component of old-school "audience appeal." Meghan Markle didn't manage that as well as she perhaps could have in the episodes of 'Archetypes' that made it to air.

In fact, the opposite tack was taken: Whether it was just a case of start-up jitters or an indication of some deeper problem, the podcast Meghan Markle and her producers created was a rather exclusive club for listeners from the get-go. It excluded in the sense that the listener was immediately confronted with a metaphorical red-velvet disco rope at the door, and to get past that rope in order to feel at home in the conversation, the listener was tacitly signaled that he or she would be better served if they somehow telepathically picked up on the instructions to align themselves either socially and/or politically with the host and her guests. The aura of exclusivity around the conversations subtracted considerably from the join-us-around-the-campfire invitation that most podcasts try to extend, and it left the impression that this host and her guests were, mainly, holding the podcast for themselves. On air, it had the effect of making the conversations more brittle and a lot less free-ranging than Americans like their podcasts to be.

That's quite a lot to ask of prospective listeners who, knowing just a little of Meghan Markle, perhaps even just that she married a British prince, might want to tune in simply to see what she has to say.