News broke that former Suits star Meghan Markle and the guy she’s hitched to Harry (last name is Windsor. Or, possibly Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, if he’s feeling old school) were breaking up with Spotify, ending an agreement with the podcasting company that dated back to 2020. The suits at Spotify were not happy that the duo’s contributions to the platform, which cost $20 million, amounted to exactly 12 episodes of content over three long years. Loudest among those complaining recently was Spotify head of global sports content Bill Simmons, who has now denounced the pair as “fucking grifters.”
Oh, come now. Flim-flammers? Sure. Swindlers? Certainly. Ne’er-do-wells? Absolutely. A coupla sticky-fingered slippery Susans? And how. Effing grifters? Preaching to the choir. Isn’t “royal” just a fancy type of grifter? Power to the people, off with their heads.
Look, if I can fool you into legally giving me a $20 million dollar contract on the strength of my name, I would absolutely do it.
Get … the … bag!
Now, Isn’t this the same platform that paid Bob Dylan a few million to produce an amount of content? And he gave them a few hours of him playing weird old folk and blues records from the 1930’s and rambling about the guy who invented Graham Crackers and his opinions on masturbation and human health before he got bored with it and just kind of wandered off?
The fact that there’s basically no way that Harry and Meghan could possibly produce interesting content means it’s pretty much entirely Spotify’s fault that they offered that much money to them without hammering out more concrete terms about how much content they would actually be producing. It’s not a surprise to anyone but execs who think that big names automatically mean a big audience.
Again, if Spotify offered me $20 million to make a podcast and the how and what were left up to me, you can be sure I’d be doing about two episodes a year ranting for an hour about how It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is the best LP ever recorded. I mean, If It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is Public Enemies Sgt. Pepper, Fear of a Black Planet is The White Album. Fear of a Black Planet is the one that pushed the experimentation to crazy levels and Welcome to the Terrordome just KILLS. But, I digress…
If they want something with more mass appeal, maybe go to someone who might have something interesting to talk about. To be fair, The Archetypes podcast premiered at #1 and it averaged out at #22. The show relied pretty heavily on the popularity of the guest – Mariah Carey and Serena Williams did well. Jameela Jamil, as awesome as she is, didn’t do as well. If Harry and Meghan do want to generate more than 12 episodes of content, I do think they’d be smart to not put themselves front and center on everything similar to what the Obamas have done over at Netflix – they appear in some of their content, but not all. I can’t help but wonder who they expected the audience to be for these two. My guess is that Spotify signed them up thinking they were going to get a monthly gossip column on Royal Life, complete with titillating untold privacy-shredding factoids about William/Kate/The Queen, and that H&M wouldn’t/couldn’t provide that.