In California, Maybe It’s Not Such Good Business After All: Meghan Markle And Spotify Officially Part Ways

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. 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. The Windsors of Montecito and their several new eagle-eyed public relations representatives would have insisted on that bit of presentation for this news byte, so as to avoid the widely-held impression across broad swaths of the public and on the many backlots of Hollywood that the dozen lackluster and occasionally downright stultifying episodes of the thing had no driving magnetism or spark, much less the kind of entertainment valence that would grow a steady audience.

In the 18 months after the celebrated 2020 inking of the now-discarded paper, there was clearly a conceptual problem with the production, or more pointedly expressed, perhaps several of them. Behind the scenes, meaning, in the Montecito mansion 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 whole notion behind the thing was to upend the conventional thinking on all sorts of ‘archetypes’ under which we labor.

The results we have in the episodes that were produced feel distinctly rushed and not well thought through, but it also can be that there was appropriately deep, thoughtful debate between Meghan Markle and her producers. We can certainly at least hope that it happened. But it doesn’t seem like it.

Nevertheless: Whether the prospective chat-show host Meghan Markle was aware of it or not, the year-and-a-half delay until any bit of product landed left Meghan 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, nuanced course-correction in the always-uncertain search for audience.

The corollary disadvantages emmanating from that Hydra head of having less time were, and are, deadly. If there’s no time to find an audience, it can engender that the producers then lurch in all directions at once, madly casting broad nets of topics out of the boat in an effort to rope in the greatest number of fish, fast, so that it at least looks on paper as if somebody has been successfully fishing. Which then leads to the problem as embodied by the episodes of ‘Archetypes’ that did make it to air: Since it is about everything, all at once, the vehicle doesn’t travel. It goes nowhere. Its purported journey becomes about nothing.

Word has somehow 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 Band-aid that may be on the current state of affairs, that’s fair. They may have at any platform that they like — who knows, Lauren Sanchez may step off the Bezos superyacht in Portofino, decide to come out of retirement and rope ‘em in 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 some time, namely, that quite a lot of the content that they commercially market is about them. There’s a distinct limit to that narrative — of oneself — and it is a highly nuanced one. If you’re going to make a business talking about yourself, you have to make sure that the door-policy of the nightclub you’re opening is quite a liberal one. You can’t afford to cherry-pick your clientele, at the very least not until things are up and running. Short and sweet: You have to be generous, and invite everybody in. Meghan Markle didn’t do that with the episodes she managed to produce of ‘Archetypes.’