Why Spotify ‘ended its £15m deal’ with Harry and Meghan

Spotify reportedly terminated its pricey deal with Harry and Meghan’s production company because there “hasn’t been a big enough audience” for the duchess’s podcast.

Earlier this week, it was reported Spotify would not be renewing its three-year deal with Archewell Audio, worth $20m (£15.6m).

Under the terms of the 2020 deal, Harry and Meghan were signed on to produce and host “programming that uplifts and entertains audiences around the world” in the form of podcasts that championed diverse voices.

The first of these was Archetypes, a 12-part series hosted by Markle. Guests on the show, which won a People’s Choice Award, included Serena Williams, Mariah Carey, Paris Hilton, Mindy Kaling, and Constance Wu.

Less than a year after it was released, the audio streaming company and Archewell Audio announced they had “mutually agreed to part ways and are proud of the series we made together”.

According to the BBC, Spotify’s decision to cut ties with Archewell Audio can be traced back to CEO Daniel Ek’s first-quarter earnings call this year when he was asked about renewing rich talent deals.

Under the leadership of former chief content officer Dawn Ostroff, Spotify spent $1bn on exclusive content deals with celebrities such as Joe Rogan, Dax Shepard, Barack and Michelle Obama, and Alex Cooper.

In January, Ostroff stepped down from her role at Spotify, amid company-wide layoffs that impacted 600 people.

When asked about renewing the expensive, celebrity podcast deals that were signed under Ostroff’s leadership in April, Ek replied: “You’re right in calling out the overpaying and over-investing and I can start off by saying that we’re not going to do that.

“We’re going to be very diligent in how we invest in future content deals and the ones that are performing we will renew and the ones that aren’t performing, we’ll obviously look at them on a case by case basis on the relative value,” the 40-year-old chief executive added.

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Commenting on the likely reason Spotify ended its partnership with Archewell Audio, British crisis communications expert Mark Borkowski told the publication: “It’s always about the content.... clearly there hasn’t been a big enough audience for it.

“If you can’t deliver your fee, no one’s going to pay it,” he added.

On Friday (16 June), the Wall Street Journal reported that Harry and Meghan haven’t “met the productivity benchmarks required to receive the full payout from the deal”, citing insiders familiar with the matter.

Meghan has only delivered 12 episodes of Archetypes since she and Harry partnered with Spotify.

In contrast, Joe Rogan – who became the world’s highest-paid podcaster after Spotify signed a $200m deal for exclusive rights to his show – releases three to four episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience every week.

The runtime of each episode is between one and three hours.

In June, Spotify announced it was laying off a further two per cent of its workforce, or 200 people, from its podcasting division.

At the time, the company also announced its updated strategy for the business, including working with lower-cost, third-party creators and driving investments in “always-on” programming.

A senior analyst at market research firm Insider Intelligence, Max Wilkens, suggested Spotify’s decision to ditch Archewell Audio is the outcome of trying to assess “what constitutes a good investment”.

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“Those were big, big deals designed to generate buzz and grab headlines and they accomplished that,” he said. “Whether they made good long-term economic sense is a different question.”

In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, a spokeswoman for Harry and Meghan’s Archewell Productions said the duchess would continue to “develop more content for the Archetypes audience on another platform”.

After it was reported the deal had fallen through, leading Spotify executive Bill Simmons criticised Harry and Meghan, calling the couple “f***ing grifters”.

“The f***ing grifters. That’s the podcast we shoulda launched with them,” he said.

“I gotta 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,” Simmons said, during a recent episode of his own podcast.

Harry and Meghan stepped down from their roles as senior members of the royal family in 2020, before relocating to Montecito, California.

Shortly after, in September 2020, it was reported Harry and Meghan had signed a multi-year, $100m (£78m) deal with Netflix to produce different kinds of content – including documentaries, docu-series, feature films, and children’s programming. .

In January 2023, their two-part docuseries Harry and Meghan was released by the streaming giant.

The end of their deal with Spotify coincides with Harry’s legal battles on both sides of the Atlantic.

The duke recently became the first royal to be cross-examined in a British court since Queen Victoria’s eldest son testified over claims he cheated in a card game in 1891.

Appearing at the High Court last week, the duke underwent nearly eight hours in the witness box as he accused Mirror Group Newspapers of using phone hacking and other unlawful information-gathering tactics to inform a total of 147 articles about him.

In the US, Harry’s memoir Spare has triggered a dispute between the US government and a conservative group seeking to reveal whether or not he disclosed his past use of drugs in his visa application.

Additional reporting by Press Association