SThis is what investor fairy tales look like: In 2006, Daniel Ek (Edvin Endre), a do-gooder guy with a programmer gene and entrepreneurial vision, came up with a start-up idea in Stockholm that could revolutionize the global music marketing industry. Unfortunately, only his former business partner Martin Lorentzon (Christian Hillborg) believes in his idea of legal free music streaming, malice is cheaper by the dozen. Martin, of course, is the alert guy in a pinstripe suit who successfully talks to banks, who gives start-ups their business plans and is passionate about turning brilliant ideas into solid business models.
His character unique selling point is the stable credibility, essential in the early days of new companies, later often considered obsolete. Daniel, the mastermind, brings another person with him. Andreas Ehn (Joel Lützow), a Gyro Gearloose of programming. It is the time when more and more people, especially young people, see illegal downloading of music as resistance to the big players in the record industry, and companies like Sony, Universal and Warner have been recording serious losses in sales for a long time.
More or less desperately, new business models for music marketing are being sought. While Per Sundin (Ulf Stenberg), head of Sony Sweden, plays his favorite records after work on his Wurlitzer jukebox and fires employees during the day, others announce the death of the CD or are on trial, such as the operators of the “Pirate Bay” download platform “.
Daniel Ek does what business geniuses do, connects needs and problems and invents Spotify. A publicly traded company today, largest music streaming provider in the world, reporting €9.67 billion in sales for 2021 on its investor website. 82 million music tracks and 4 million podcasts are available here (2021), based on a “freemium” model. Basic services are advertising-financed and free of charge, premium offers offer additional services and data evaluations. The history of Spotify is remarkable, at least in economic, technological and network policy terms.
It’s the story that pleases the stock market
It’s a David vs. Goliath tale of nerdy coders buying off record bosses and turning media usage upside down. And it’s not really true, or at least in part, or only from a certain perspective. It’s the story that pleases the stock market and the inventor. There are other descriptions that only partially match the supposed heroic story and in some points not at all. According to the Swedish Netflix series “The Playlist”, each of the main characters involved has their own story. Six main characters, six versions of the truth. And an ending that emphasizes the fictional nature of all six stories while staying true to the factual cornerstones.
Because “The Playlist” tells the fight, rise and criticism of Spotify in the time frame from 2006 to 2025, i.e. into the future. This future does not belong to the current or previous company spokespersons, but to a musician who is represented on Spotify. Whereby Bobbie T. (Janice Kamya Kavander) did not go to school with just any “creator”, but – in the series – with Daniel Ek. He always admired her as an artist. In 2006 he attended her concert in a small club. She is his inspiration.
Almost twenty years later, she’s still performing in bars. With intimate, powerful and melancholic songs that get under your skin and to which the last episode of the series, “Bobbie T.”, dedicates a lot of time and space. The direction is obvious: Respect for the artists is at the heart of the final episode. So what the semi-fictional Daniel Ek starts with in the first episode “Daniel” as an enthusiastic entrepreneur. A respect that he, as the further episodes fan out, thoroughly betrayed. So now a new David vs. Goliath story needs to be told, with musicians as David and Spotify as the Goliath dictating the compensation models.
The Playlist is based on the non-fiction book Spotify Untold by Swedish business journalists Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud. The series contains everything that a good (business) drama needs: ideals, enthusiasm, betrayed convictions, sins, growth compulsions, the explanation of legal framework conditions, the dreams of computer nerds, a Mephistophelic pact and liberation activism. She also tells stories of how the public uses the internet for a stretch, vividly enlivening coders’ imaginary worlds without bogging down in the autistic cliché.
Developed by Luke Franklin and written by Sofie and Tove Forsman, each of the six episodes actually stages itself as part of a six-song playlist. Six interpreters (Daniel the idea generator, record boss Per Sundin, license lawyer Petra Hansson (Gizem Erdogan), Coder Andreas and musician Bobbie) appear, each with a different cinematic sound, with a recognizable film aesthetic signature, their own refrain and personal coda (directed by Per-Olav Sorensen).
Questions of copyright, including data protection, are made so concrete and exciting in this company history, which is reflected on six times, in a way that users with an affinity for the pure crime genre would hardly believe possible. What begins in the first episode with nostalgia for ascension from the point of view of the fictional Daniel Ek leads to important unresolved questions at the end. Art, here music, comes further after bread, apart from a few counter-examples. Free mentality is trumps. Spotify hasn’t changed much about that either. Some think: on the contrary.
the playlist starts today on Netflix.
