Two and a half years after Meghan Markle and Prince Harry announced an exclusive podcast deal with Spotify, the couple’s team at Archewell Audio has announced that the partnership has come to an end. The news comes after The Wall Street Journal reported that Spotify would not renew Meghan’s interview series, Archetypes, which aired its first season from August to November 2022, for a second season.
“Spotify and Archewell Audio have mutually agreed to part ways and are proud of the series we made together,” read a joint statement from Archewell and Spotify. The series premiered at number one on the platform and ultimately went on to win a People’s Choice Award for pop podcast of 2022. Markle also won a Gracie Award for top entertainment podcast host. The news comes as layoffs have impacted Gimlet, the Spotify studio that had partnered with Archewell to produce the program. Spotify announced about 200 layoffs earlier this month as part of its plan to shift its podcast strategy. Sources told Variety that the end of the partnership was not related to Spotify’s restructuring.
In December 2020, Meghan and Harry announced that they had inked a deal with Spotify, and later that month they released a holiday-themed episode, which included cameos from famous names Naomi Osaka, Sir Elton John, Tyler Perry, and James Corden. Further content didn’t come for a year and a half, and ultimately the partnership led to 13 podcast episodes. The deal is said to have been worth roughly $20 million, but people familiar with the matter told the Journal that the couple did not reach the productivity benchmarks that would lead to the full payout.
In a statement to the newspaper, a representative for Markle said that the duchess is still planning to develop more audio content. “The team behind Archetypes remain proud of the podcast they created at Spotify,” it read. “Meghan is continuing to develop more content for the Archetypes audience on another platform.” The Archewell head of audio, Rebecca Sananès, moved on from the organization last December, and she was replaced by Sarina Regan, an alum of Cadence13 and SiriusXM.
The end of the Spotify partnership winds down one of the couple’s earliest post-royal businesses, a portfolio that has seen them partner with large media companies eager to work with the (relatively) forthcoming prince and his Hollywood-veteran wife. Earlier this year, Harry’s memoir, Spare, broke records when it went on sale, moving upwards of 1.43 million copies on its first day. The couple reportedly signed a four-book deal with Penguin Random House in 2021, which has led to speculation that they might be planning a leadership book or another memoir.
Since announcing the formation of Archewell Productions and a deal with Netflix in September 2020, Meghan and Harry have coproduced two documentary series. After the premiere of Harry & Meghan in December 2022, the streamer announced that it broke documentary viewership records with 81.55 million hours viewed, and their second series, Live to Lead, aired later that month. An animated series coproduced by Markle and David Furnish was canceled last spring, before it went to air.
Archewell currently has one more show in the pipeline with Netflix. Heart of Invictus, a docuseries about the athletic event for wounded veterans that Harry founded in 2014, is reportedly set to premiere this summer, but a date has not been announced.
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Erin Vanderhoof
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