The Duchess of Sussex has suffered another blow this week after her new podcast Confessions of a Female Founder fails to chart.
Meghan Markle’s new Lemonada podcast – a follow-up to Archetypes, which failed to land and led to Spotify not renewing the Sussexes £25millon contract in 2023 – has plummeted out of the Spotify 100 list, both in the US and UK.
A show called Sleep Cove, helping listeners with guided sleep, meditation, as well as sleep hypnosis proved to be more popular among British listeners, placing 79th on Spotify’s UK chart.
The latest episode of the female empowerment podcast also failed to crack Apple’s Top 200 chart. MailOnline has approached Meghan Markle’s representatives for comment.
It comes as MailOnline exclusively revealed the Suits’ actress had tried to get A-listers such as Beyonce and Taylor Swift on Confessions of a Female Founder, which was said to already be in crisis talks after only three episodes.
‘No one’s picking up the phone’, one source close to the production has claimed, adding: ‘The show is not landing’.
‘There’s no Taylor Swift. No Beyoncé. Not even a Hailey Bieber. And when you’re pitching female empowerment, that’s a problem. It speaks volumes for her pulling power. She’s not happy about her lack of appeal’, they added.
Meghan Markle’s (pictured at the Time 100 Summit) podcast has failed to chart on the UK or the US Spotify chart
The Duchess of Sussex launched her ‘Confessions Of A Female Founder’ podcast last month
Her follow up to Archetypes, which failed to land and led to Spotify not renewing the Sussexes £25millon contract in 2023, was less popular among UK listeners than a show about sleep (stock image)
The Duchess’s debut episode saw her welcome Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, with the second instalment featuring Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code.
However a source close to the production of the show alleged Meghan as well as her team had ‘dialled all the big names’ to join her for ‘honest conversations with women who’ve built from the ground up, faced challenges and kept going.’
However these phone calls were reportedly quietly ignored, according to Radar.
More recently, on the third episode of her podcast featuring her friend and hair colourist Kadi Lee, the Duchess of Sussex confessed the original name for her lifestyle brand As Ever became a ‘word salad’.
Last year, the actress presented her venture, selling goods such as raspberry spread, as American Rivera Orchard, but plagued with trademarking setbacks she changed the name to As Ever last February – only weeks before the launch.
Netflix are also now a partner in her lifestyle brand, As Ever.
Speaking about the brand’s name, she said: ‘I had secured As Ever as a name in 2022, and then as everything started to evolve last year, and bringing in a partner the size that it was, and it was just so interesting.
‘Because you remember, I said, ‘I like American Riviera as an umbrella,’ and then be able to have verticals beneath it. And maybe have the ‘Orchard’ really small. But when that’s not feasible… suddenly it became this word salad. I didn’t love that so much.’
A source has claimed that Meghan and her team wanted A-listers like Beyonce (pictured with the Sussexes and Jay-Z in 2019) and Taylor Swift to appear on her podcast
The Duchess of Sussex reportedly attended Taylor Swift’s LA concert in 2023
Meghan Markle with Kadi Lee at a Highbrow Hippie event in Venice, California, last November
‘I was like, ‘OK, well let’s go back to the thing that I’ve always loved. Let’s use the name that I protected for a reason that had been sort of under wraps’.
‘And then we were able to focus in the quiet and put our heads down and build on something that no one was sniffing around to even see about.
‘It was just really, really helpful to have that quiet period which you would know after spending so many years working on something, building it and the pivots that you had to take with it.’
Meghan’s guest Lee runs the Highbrow Hippie salon in the Los Angeles area of Venice, with her clients including Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Sigourney Weaver.
Last November, the Suits actress also divulged that hse had invested in her friends company, telling InStyle she was ‘so proud to invest in her as a friend and as a female founder’.
