Split down the road

There is no more making joint deals with the alliterate one and her husband.

She is looking to make deals only for herself which means she is seeing the split down the road too.

Meghan Markle

Prince Harry

Is the Air Coming Out of Harry and Meghan’s Content Balloon?

In early 2021, after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sat for a bombshell Oprah interview on the heels of their megawatt deals with Netflix and Spotify, the spitball-attracting royals seemed poised to become media machers in their own right. “They reached a whole new audience who now can’t wait to see what happens next,” the veteran royal chronicler Tina Brown told me at the time. Media analyst Rich Greenfield echoed that sentiment, saying, “I think this clearly shows, whatever their profile was beforehand in the US and globally, it’s clearly that much larger now.” A Hollywood source concurred: “I think the crossover appeal—Black Lives Matter meets The Crown—is a fever pitch opportunity.”

A little more than two years later, it’s fair to say the jury is still out. Yes, Harry published a blockbuster, sales-record-busting memoir with the help of an A-list ghostwriter, earning himself the type of press blitz that most authors would kill for. Yes, the Sussexes’ drama-filled autobiographical docuseries last December was Netflix’s highest-viewed documentary debut on record, giving tens of millions of viewers something to love-hate as they closed out 2022. But by now, anyone who may have been expecting a full-on smorgasbord of Harry-and-Meghan–curated content, under the auspices of Archewell Productions, has probably moderated their expectations.

A whoosh of air came rushing out of the balloon last week when it was announced that Harry/Meghan and Spotify had “mutually agreed” to bail on the $20 million partnership they’d consummated back in 2020. You could chalk it up to Spotify’s big reorganization as it grapples with a broader market correction in the high-dollar podcasting space. But press reports about the breakup haven’t exactly worked in Harry and Meghan’s favor.

The Wall Street Journal’s sources indicated that Spotify hadn’t renewed Meghan’s Archetypes podcast, of which there are only 12 episodes to date, and that the couple hadn’t “met the productivity benchmarks required to receive the full payout from the deal.” – Source