News broke this week that Meghan Markle’s podcast with Spotify, “Archetypes,” would not be renewed for a second season, signaling the end of her and husband Prince Harry’s multimillion-dollar deal with the company. And royal experts are speaking out about the severed deal and what it means for the couple, with royal biographer Angela Levin surmising that the pair’s “value isn’t high as it was once”—and also predicting that their future projects will be “a disaster,” per The Sun.
Royal commentator Richard Fitzwilliams agreed, per Page Six, calling the end of the lucrative deal a “failure.”
“The idea was that several series would be produced,” he said. “Since only one was, there’s no doubt the contract could be considered a failure. Clearly, this relationship hasn’t been as mutually beneficial.”
Harry and Meghan signed the $20 million deal with Spotify back in 2020, not long after their step back as working members of the royal family. An insider told The Post that Harry and Meghan didn’t produce enough content to justify their full payout.
In a joint statement, Spotify and Archewell Audio said they have “mutually agreed to part ways and are proud of the series we made together.” Yet Spotify’s head of podcast innovation Bill Simmons apparently made comments on his own podcast that Harry and Meghan were “grifters” about 24 hours after the announcement of the couple’s dissolving partnership with Spotify.
“I wish I’d been involved in the Harry and Meghan leave Spotify negotiation,” Simmons said. “The f—king grifters. That’s the podcast that we should’ve launched with them.” He continued “I gotta get drunk one night and tell the story of the Zoom I had with Harry to try to help him with podcast ideas. The grifters.”
As to the crumbling empire comment, though, let’s not maybe go that far—Harry and Meghan still have a Netflix deal worth a reported $100 million, and Harry reportedly made around $20 million from Penguin Random House for his memoir, Spare, released earlier this year.
