For those who want a break from Halloween, we’ve got the perfect series for you to binge on.
The Playlist is Netflix’s new docu-drama miniseries about the foundation of the
world’s leading music platform Spotify. It unfolds in six parts – each told from
a different character’s perspective.
The story starts with an idea in the mind of founder and CEO Daniel Ek, and ends with a teasing look into the future. And you never know quite who is telling the truth, also because none of the characters seem to believe each other either.
The miniseries is adapted from a 2021 book by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud called The Spotify Play: How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google, and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance.
The Playlist is set mainly in Sweden, and the country’s politics plays a major part in the story. More socialist approaches to creative commerce are shown through the phenomenon of Pirate Bay, which used to make music and other media available online for free, just relying on advertising for revenue.
Spotify was also built around that idea of music for free. Much of the conflict in the story stems from record companies wanting to charge for the music and Spotify standing by the idea that it should be free.
But for all those socialist good intentions, by the later episodes you see that artists are struggling and claiming they are being chronically underpaid. In episode six The Artist we see Ek’s childhood friend, a musician, join a nationwide protest against Spotify. She later leads the “Scratch the Record,” campaign which takes Spotify to court in America to demand a fixed rate per stream.
Through sharp cutting and creative transitions, each scene flows seamlessly, until those moments when the actors break the fourth wall and speak directly to the camera. This leaves the audience feeling uneasy and interrupted, but also emphasises the importance of what is being said.
The star of the story is Edvin Endre as Daniel Ek, the Swedish prodigy who sold one company for 10 million krone to retire at 22, only to found Spotify a few months later. The first episode, The Vision, presents his perspective.
Another main character is Martin Lorentzon, played by Christian Hillborg. He is one of the partners who bought Ek’s original company and later co-founded Spotify as its leading investor. Martin finds out that he might be neurodivergent with ADHD, which causes him to question his motives and decision-making. In the same episode Ek asks Lorentzon to stand down as Spotify Chairman on his wedding day.
In episode two, The Industry, we meet one of the executives of Sony Music Sweden who was involved in a lawsuit with Pirate Bay named Per Sundin, played by Ulf Stenberg.
Actress Gizem Erdogan plays the role of Petra Hansson. Petra is the superwoman lawyer who quit her job to work for Spotify as main negotiator with record companies over ownership of the music on the platform. Her perspective on the birth of Spotify is told in episode three, The Law.
The last three episodes present the perspectives of The Coder (episode 4), The Partner (episode 5), and finally The Artist (episode 6).
The Coder is Andreas Ehn, Spotify’s first employee and chief technology offcer (CTO) – the man who masterminded the building of the platform, played by Joel Lützow. And the artist in the final episode is is a musician called Bobbie Thomasson, played by Janice Kamaya.
All the stars do an exceptional job at playing the characters, both by showing their differences and by making their particular angle on the story unique and affecting. The first four parts of the series are the strongest, as they are pretty straightforward and tell similar stories. They also follow an easy timeline which makes it much easier for the viewer to understand what is going on, unlike the last two, which leave the viewer extremely confused.
One of the most distinctive features of this series is the extremely clever use of colour and sound. The series uses a muted colour palette and black-and-white filters to move from the present to moments in the past. Sound, and lack of it, also achieves in giving a sense of jumping around in time. This creative editing helps the viewer follow the non-chronological storytelling, so that they can understand the information as it builds towards the end.
The Playlist keeps the viewer hooked, and is hard to turn it off.
