How Harry and Meghan’s Spotify deal fell apart: interviews with Trump and Putin about their childhood traumas and lack of ideas

The Harry and Meghan show is starting to lose its shine – professionally, that is. A year after Netflix canceled Meghan’s animated series Pearl, their Spotify podcast has also been chopped. In December 2020, after the Duke and Duchess settled in California, they announced a juicy $20 million deal with Spotify, the top podcast platform. But a partnership that was touted as content-rich has not quite lived up to its promise. In two and a half years, the couple’s podcast only produced one season of Markle’s Archetypes. The project was canceled on June 16, leaving many wondering what led to the high profile flop.

Spotify has been cutting costs by canceling many high-profile deals, and recently laid off 200 employees (2% of its workforce), suggesting a shift in the company’s long-term strategy. But Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman wrote in her weekly newsletter on podcasting, the music industry and audio trends that Harry and Meghan got canceled because they never came up with any good ideas and didn’t produce much content.

Carman has been investigating and interviewing people to find out why Prince Harry never did anything with the Spotify platform. Both Spotify and Archewell (Harry and Meghan’s production company) declined to comment, although the Archewell website still has language announcing the Spotify partnership. “Harry spoke with multiple producers and production houses… to discuss possible shows. Along the way, Harry listened to various ideas from others but mostly stuck by his own – including one about childhood trauma,” writes Carman. The concept: Harry would interview a series of controversial guests, such as [Russian President] Vladimir Putin, [Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg, and [former US President] Donald Trump, about their formative years and how those experiences shaped their adult lives.

The ideas that swirled in the prince’s head were quickly dismissed as unrealistic by those around him. Neither Trump nor Putin are typically inclined to grant that type of interview, much less about their private lives and childhoods. And if they did grant such an interview, it wouldn’t be with an outcast prince with contrarian views. In fact, Trump openly criticized the couple shortly after they left their royal duties when they called for support of Trump’s political rivals in the 2020 election. “I’m not a fan of hers,” said Trump about Meghan Markle. “I’ll tell you something she probably has heard before. I wish Harry a lot of luck – he’s going to need it.”

It seems Harry also had an idea for a podcast on fatherhood, and another one that tackled major societal conversations episode by episode, ranging from climate change to religion. For the latter, Harry hoped to have Pope Francis on as a guest. None of this came to fruition. The only content they produced was 12 episodes of Markle chatting with people like Serena Williams, Paris Hilton, Mariah Carey and Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell. After some initial enthusiasm when it launched in August 2022, public interest in the podcast faded.

Ashley Carman says the pandemic also negatively affected the couple’s podcasting project. Not just because of lockdowns and difficulties doing interviews, but also because so many celebrities at home with nothing much to do launched podcasts of their own. The surge in content produced by famous people saturated the market, and many projects fell by the wayside as platforms started canceling celebrity contracts and laying off workers like Spotify.

Poor opinions about Harry and Meghan’s scarce output abound at Spotify. Earlier this year, the company’s head of podcast innovation and monetization, Bill Simmons, didn’t hesitate to criticize the royals on his own podcast. Simmons said he was “embarrassed” to share a platform with Harry. “What does he do? It’s one of those things where it’s like, what’s your talent,” he asked. “Why are we listening to you? So you were born in a royal family and then you left… Nobody cares what you have to say about anything unless you talk about the royal family, and you just complain about them.”

Simmons tore into the couple again on a recent episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast. “Fucking grifters – that’s the podcast they should have launched… One night I’ll get drunk and tell the story of my Zoom call with Harry. I was trying to help him get a podcast off the ground. It’s one of my best stories.”

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