The Playlist Review: Opportunity and introspection at Spotify

Netflix’s latest miniseries tracks the many minds behind the creation of the world’s most popular and profitable music streaming venture from a team of colourful characters in Stockholm, Sweden. 

The series is a dramatised retelling of the story behind Spotify, inspired by the book Spotify Untold written by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud. Directed by Per-Olav Sørensen, the series tells a "fictionalized" story of the birth of the Swedish music streaming company, Spotify along with the myriad challenges it posed.

As all tech startups, Spotify owes its humble origins to the unassuming nerds, with their heads buried in computer screens, frantically churning lines upon lines of code. The series plays well into these geek tropes but manages to strike a healthy balance by championing their work as the cornerstone of the multi-billion dollar music platform.

And the mastermind behind the product, responsible for bringing together this group of tech-Avengers was none other than the co-founder and CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, portrayed by the terrific Edvin Andre, whose ever-receding hairline does not do justice to his haughty opinions and even more so swaggering gait.

Daniel’s vision was pure and stemmed from the vigilante-styled endeavors of his contemporaries - Fredrik Neij and his posse of internet marauders at Pirate Bay. Where Pirate Bay's utopian Robin Hood-esque approach at file sharing rights was subjected to intense backlash from the crippled record industry, Daniel saw opportunity ripe for the taking.

The noble ventures of revolutionising the music industry forever by making music instantly accessible and for free are consistently brought to the fore through screenwriter Christian Spurrier’s almost sales pitch-like provocative writing. The many months leading up to Spotify’s launch were a culmination of different sustained efforts on multiple fronts to keep the idea from caving in on itself and are reflected in the structuring of the series.

The six-part series is divided into five differing perspectives on the origins of the company - The Vision, The Industry, The Law, The Coder, The Partner - and a final chapter detailing a fictionalized aftermath of Spotify set a couple years into the future, through the perspective of one of the many struggling artists that fall under its ambit. 

Though “The Industry’s” telling of Sony Music Sweden’s executive Per Sundin’s outdated notions of the music industry offer some necessary balance in the whole out with the old, in with the new debate and Spotify interface designer Andreas Ehn’s almost incel-like determination at maintaining Spotify’s original integrity in “The Coder” are some of the finer episodes; the most heartfelt segment in the Spotify story remains “The Partner”.

Recounting the perspective of Spotify co-founder Marin Lorentzon, the flamboyant primary investor that kept the basemented headquarters of Spotify alive both energetically and financially. Lorentzon’s desk-leaping charisma was brought to life by the brilliant Christian Hillborg in a series of exaggerated idiosyncrasies. 

However, behind the veil of Lorentzon’s optimism lay a sudden, unprompted diagnosis of neurodivergency; one that not only served as the missing piece of the puzzle, but offered a befitting take on the benefits of being on the spectrum in the tech-startup industry - a mind that perpetually thinks out of the box.

Lorentzon’s eventual fall from grace is the perfect reflection of the eventual malicious intentions of the tech industry. Nobler resolves are instantly bastardized given just a whiff of the potential profits that these enterprises have to offer. 

By the end of it, the series gets so self-reflective of the inherent exploitation that Spotify endorses, that it's hard to identify whether this self-awareness stems from genuine satirical introspection or worse, one that the company champions regardless of the outcome.

In a telling piece of dialogue from Lorentzon from the series, he proclaims Spotify’s music-for-all initiative to succeed where Communism failed. Therein lies the perfect poetic corruption in The Playlist’s interpretation of the Spotify story.

We’re going with 4 out 5 stars for The Playlist.

The Playlist is available to stream on Netflix.