Spotify has just announced that its £20m podcasting deal with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (the artists formerly known as Harry and Meghan) has come to an end after three years and 12 episodes of Archetypes, The Meg’s series on labels used to hold women back.

There’s a lot to unpack from just that single sentence, but if you also factor in comments from Bill Simmons, Spotify’s head of podcast innovation and monetisation, in which he called the couple “fucking grifters”, you have the basis for a serious discussion about how content is commissioned in the 21st Century.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say right upfront that I’ve been a republican all my adult life. I really couldn’t care less about the fraternal feuds, regal rifts or stately schisms that the tabloids cream their collective pants over. I do think that the Sussexes have been the ‘victims’ (and I use the word warily) of a lot of very unpleasant establishment behaviour, but I’m not sure that their response has been coherent or well advised.

Their media production deals are one aspect of their post-royal lives that have had me shaking my head slowly in disbelief.

For example, the couple signed a five-year, $100m contract with Netflix in September 2020 “to produce documentaries, docuseries, feature films, scripted shows and children's programming”. That’s right: a not-hugely-successful actor and her husband, who spent a few years in the military and has helped establish a Paralympics-style event for injured veterans, were handed $100m for their production company, which had previously made… well, nothing. They had no track record as media producers - and yet Netflix handed them $100m.

I’ve also sent a few Dear Netflix emails, but for some bizarre reason, they haven’t given me a $100m contract yet.

And then we come to the Spotify deal.

Spotify is a company that has undermined the earnings of recording artists as part of its business model. A song needs to chalk up 1.6m streams to earn an artist $1,000 in streaming mechanical royalties. To earn $1,000 from a download or physical record/CD in mechanical royalties, you need to sell around 11,000 copies. This gives you some idea of the sound underpinnings of Spotify’s moral high ground. The streamer doesn’t want to pay musicians, but it falls over itself to offer £20m to a production company that had, prior to the deal, never produced any audio.

Does this make the Sussexes grifters, or did they just take money that was offered to them in full knowledge of their lack of experience in creating content?

The definition of a grifter is a con artist who swindles people out of money through fraud. Spotify and Netflix both knew who the Sussexes were when they offered them deals: indeed, the deals were offered because of who they are. Like the rest of the world, the media companies knew the previous histories of the people they were doing deals with, so there was no fraud. And if there was no fraud, the Sussexes can’t be accused of grifting.

However, if we’re examining the decisions behind the deals, perhaps we should focus on the media companies instead of Harry and Meghan.

Media companies have been falling over themselves for the last couple of decades to offer content deals to ‘celebrities’. From Madonna and David Walliams writing children’s books to the current state of celebrity-saturated podcasting, media companies have habitually handed bundles of cash to people to create content where they have no track record. It’s bad enough that creative artists have been trusted to branch out to disciplines in which they have no experience, but when you see reality TV ‘stars’, people with no discernible creative talent (self-promotion doesn’t count), being given deals, it’s hard not to wonder exactly who is making these decisions.

Creating something of merit, from scratch, is hard. It takes years of training, honing skills, trying and failing, trying again, failing again and sheer perseverance to get to a point where your process is capable of producing something of value. And just because someone is a genius in one field, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they will also be in another. Take David Bowie, a true artistic visionary and creatively unmatched in popular musical history. Have you seen him acting, though? If even Bowie can’t hit the same creative peak in another discipline, forgive me for being sceptical about Geri Halliwell’s writing.

The fault doesn’t lie with ‘celebrity’ chancers, though. Like the Sussexes, they’ve been offered cash: who’s going to turn it down? It’s like the tailor of the emperor’s new clothes refusing to make suits for courtiers and subjects.

No, it’s the laziness of commissioners in media companies that has led to this devaluation of content. It’s the same laziness that failed to react to the internet’s threat to the revenues of traditional media companies. A lack of imagination, an inability to see beyond the obvious or short-term, and no understanding of how content is created have combined to lead us to where we are now.

Does this mean the Spotify/Sussex deal is the beginning of the end for celebrity content? I doubt it.

I also doubt that the likes of Simmons will see the hypocrisy of their position and continue to commission slebs wearing no clothes. Meanwhile, content creators continue to struggle to get their voices heard.

Right, now that’s off my chest, I’m off to pitch my Love Island jukebox musical to Netflix.