Taylor Swift ‘declined personal invitation from Meghan to appear on her Spotify podcast’

Taylor Swift turned down an invitation to appear on Meghan Markle’s podcast despite receiving a “personal letter” from Duchess, it is alleged.

The pop singer was asked by Meghan herself to appear on Archetypes, but she declined through her rep, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The blow comes as Netflix and Spotify executives reportedly said they were “underwhelmed” by Harry and Meghan’s lack of ideas and productivity.

Since resigning from royal duties in 2020 and moving to California to move into their new $14 million nine-bedroom mansion, the couple have built a complex network of “entertainment” businesses to promote “their truth.” .

Following Spotify’s axe of Archetypes and the £18 million partnership with the pair, Netflix has also said it is unlikely to renew its deal after it expires in 2025.

However, it has been confirmed that the pair are currently making a Great Expectations-inspired show for Netflix called Bad Manners.

Described as a prequel to the Charles Dickens classic, the show tells the story of a lonely Miss Haversham living in a patriarchal society.

It is currently unknown if the show was commissioned by Netflix itself.

A documentary about the Invictus Games, a production agreed shortly after the couple signed the £80 million deal with Netflix in 2020, is also in the works.

The program, Heart of Invictus, follows participants around the world as they train for the Games in The Hague, which were expected to take place in 2020 but have been postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic.

It’s one of the couple’s few ideas that wasn’t rejected by the streaming giant.

According to the Wall Street Journal analysis, Harry and Meghan had suggested shows that were too similar to already popular Netflix shows, such as sitcoms like Emily in Paris but “about a man,” and a show about LGBTQ characters similar to the one in Heartstopper .

Another suggestion was a documentary on disinformation – which also fell off the drawing board.

A team assigned to the job at Archewell inevitably had questions, including whether Harry and Meghan would appear on the show and give their thoughts on the subject.

The pair responded to the questions with little resolution and the idea was dropped, according to the WSJ.

Also turned down was an animated show about powerful women in history called Pearl.

When it revealed the cancellation of the children’s show in May 2022, Netflix representatives said it had decided that children would not be affected by the fact that the show was produced by a duchess.

Meghan’s podcast, produced by Spotify as part of their deal and about stereotypes faced by women, also hit a brick wall this month and will not be signed for a second season.

The streaming giant and the Sussexes’ audio production company, Archewell Audio, released a joint statement last week saying they have “mutually agreed to part ways and are proud of the series we have created together.”

Meghan and Harry reportedly signed a £15 million ($20 million) deal with Spotify for the project in late 2020, but insiders close to the audio giant claim the royal couple failed to meet the productivity benchmark required to receive the full payout . Wall Street Journal reported.

The talent agency that recently signed Meghan, WME, said: “The team behind Archetypes continue to be proud of the podcast they created at Spotify.

“Meghan will continue to develop more content for the Archetypes audience on another platform.”

It was also revealed that while working on the Archetypes podcast, Spotify executives grew increasingly frustrated with Archewell’s snail-paced approach, stressing that it would take a long time to come up with an idea for an episode and asking Meghan to bother minute changes.

Getting guests to the show also proved difficult — with Taylor Swift turning down a gig.

Despite these tensions, the podcast launched last August and rose to the top of the streaming charts in its first week.

Harry’s appearance on podcasts – which was part of the Spotify deal – came to nothing.

He reportedly struggled to get a solid idea, with the Wall Street Journal revealing that he suggested veteran topics, misinformation and a point of view about a new resident of America.

However, the pair have found that their personal experiences, recounted in Harry’s memoir Spare and their shared six-part Netflix documentary, have propelled book sales and popularity to Netflix.

Harry’s smash autobiography grossed £16 million and became the fastest-selling non-fiction book since records began in 1998, publishers claimed, selling more than 3.2 million copies worldwide in its first week.

In the United Kingdom, it sold more than 750,000 copies during the same period, according to publishing company Transworld, the British division of Penguin Random House.

It’s clear that Prince Harry has donated a significant portion of the money raised from the publication to charity, with the father-of-two expected to give somewhere in the region of £1.6 million to charity.

Netflix reportedly paid a whopping £81 million for the bombshell docuseries ‘Harry & Meghan’ last December as part of a multi-year deal with the company.

The series became Netflix’s second highest-ranked documentary ever – behind The Tinder Swindler.

It’s clear that the project created tension for Archewell after Harry and Meghan put the finishing touches on and were sometimes overruled.

The pair then hoped to hit the streaming charts again with their series ‘Live to Lead’, a docuseries about world leaders and activists that aired on New Year’s Eve in 2022.

However, the show did not make the top ten most-streamed shows during that period.

Both their flopped Spotify deal and temporary deal with Netflix were reportedly impacted by external factors, on top of reportedly strained working relationships with the couple, Archewell and the streaming giants.

In the wake of the pandemic, Netflix has struggled to retain loyal viewers who have been glued to their screens during the lockdown and turned a profit for the company.

Netflix’s subscriber growth began to slow as customers returned to normal life, announcing the first quarter of a decade’s subscriber loss in 2022. In turn, producers and movie studios are much more selective about content output.

And recently, Spotify announced it would be laying off about 200 staff — about 2 percent of its workforce — who work within their podcast teams. It cited difficulties in making podcasts profitable despite its popularity among listeners.