In 2020, a $US20 million deal was struck between Archewell Audio and Spotify to produce audio content for the streaming audio platform. Aside from sporadic bursts of content, nothing substantial was released until August 2022 when the company delivered Archetypes, a series of 12 episodes in which Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, interviewed high-profile women.
But the podcast series drew negative headlines, notably that while Meghan did some of the interviews – those with high-profile guests, such as actress Mindy Kaling, television personality Andy Cohen and tennis legend Serena Williams – others, typically with low or no-profile guests, were done by producers and Meghan’s questions were added later. By June, Spotify had exited the deal.
![Not her first rodeo … Queen Camilla conducts a radio interview with the BBC in 2020.](https://www.todaysauthormagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/0665cdb2655364ecabb776da353e7ede2ebc734b.jpeg)
Not her first rodeo … Queen Camilla conducts a radio interview with the BBC in 2020.
Bill Simmons, Spotify’s head of podcast innovation and monetisation, said on his own podcast that month he wished he “had been involved in the Meghan-and-Harry-leave-Spotify negotiation. The F–king Grifters. That’s the podcast we should have launched with them”. (For context, Simmons was not a Spotify employee speaking out of turn; he took a leadership role in Spotify after selling his podcast network Ringer to them for $US196 million in 2020.)
More than a year earlier, in a podcast released in January 2022, Simmons also took aim at Harry and Meghan. “You live in f—ing Montecito and you just sell documentaries and podcasts and nobody cares what you have to say about anything unless you talk about the royal family, and you just complain about them,” he said.
In contrast, The Queen’s Reading Room may become significant for a more substantial reason: it is not customary for reigning monarchs to grant interviews. This means the notion of a Queen sitting down for an off-the-cuff conversation, even one about literature, is an almost unprecedented event.
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Queen Elizabeth II, for example, never sat down for an interview apart from a talk in 2018 about her coronation, though she was often taped off the cuff in snippets of conversation by TV cameras and, in 1968, allowed a joint BBC-ITV crew to film a documentary, Royal Family. (As you would expect, she retained the copyright and after one year removed the documentary from circulation; it can still be seen on YouTube.)
Though the custom seems deeply entrenched in royal culture, Prince Philip’s biographer Gyles Brandreth suggested in 2021 the rule may have been laid down by Philip himself. “I know that the [late] Duke of Edinburgh’s rule was, don’t talk about yourself, don’t give personal interviews.”
“The Queen’s Reading Room Podcast is a place for book lovers, and those who wish they loved literature a little more, to be inspired by the bookish confessions of global literary heroes,” the organisation’s announcement said. “[The series] will delve into the homes and hearts of the authors that we love the most.”