Netflix: The Playlists

Spotify has by now become the most widely used tool for listening to music. But how did the world's most famous streaming platform come about? Its story – from its conception at the hands of Swedes Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon up to the present day – is told in this six-episode miniseries, available on Netflix.

Inspired by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud's book “Spotify Untold”, the Swedish Netflix series tells the fictionalized story of Spotify, starting from its founding by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, up to the present day, in which the streaming platform has by now profoundly and permanently changed the way society as a whole consumes music.

Anyone who reads these pages or others devoted to in-depth music coverage can only agree on the platform's revolutionary impact. For countless compulsive listeners, collectors or simple music fans, the birth of Spotify marks a clear before and after. Even most diehard supporters of physical formats can't help but admit the platform's usefulness for sampling new music before deciding whether to buy it on CD or vinyl. Daniel Ek's dream – having the entire global, historical discography just a click away – is, in fact, the dream of any self-respecting music fan. Whatever its merits, “The Playlist” lets music lovers learn about the origins and development of the most important aspects behind the main tool they now use to listen to music.

Just like David Fincher's masterpiece about Facebook, “The Social Network” from 2009”, “The Playlist” too, probably in a deliberate nod to it, takes its title from the very object, the tool, at the heart of the revolution it depicts. Unfortunately, whatever the intentions of creators Christian Spurrier, Sofie Forsman and Tove Forsman, the similarities end there. “The Playlist” is certainly an enjoyable watch, and a genuinely successful one when it comes to recounting the conception and rollout of Daniel Ek's platform revolution, but it fails completely whenever it tries to bite, to expose, to dig deep into the ethical contradictions of the project.

Where "The Social Network" is a ruthless work, never absolving anyone, that strikes at the whole of society through the target of Mark Zuckerberg, "The Playlists" reveals itself to be excessively rhetorical and mawkish precisely when it decides to raise doubts about Daniel Ek and his creation, while remaining fundamentally undecided about which stance to take. This happens above all when the series brings up - also revealing the dissent within the development team - Spotify's sudden shift from a streaming service born for free music consumption to a platform that is (at least in part) paid, while then making Ek's transformation from an alternative to torrent-platform pirates into a partner of the record labels seem almost natural.

It happens above all, though, in the final, cloying episode. A "The Artist" that tries to put Ek and his partners in the stocks over the long-standing issue of the paltry earnings paid out to artists on Spotify, dragging them before the American Senate for a hearing and showing the impassioned protests of artists unable to make ends meet - yet it brings the series to a close with an uncertain, vaguely exculpatory tone. The screenwriters' intention to also show the political and controversial side of the Spotify story is therefore not backed by any real dose of courage, nor by a sufficiently clear and decisive stance.

The series works very well, on the other hand, when it comes to telling the story of Spotify, from its conception to its development, from the record labels' initial distrust of the platform to its global triumph. Through a structure that is perhaps somewhat predictable, dedicating each episode to a character and thus retracing the same timeline from different perspectives, "The Playlists" examines every aspect that made the platform's success possible.

After the first episode, inevitably centred on the figure of Daniel Ek (Edvin Endre), which serves as a general overview of Spotify's history, the series presents us with an interesting carousel of characters, more or less fictionalised, each intent on telling us their version of events. The story proceeds at a brisk pace, never lapsing into sterile didacticism.

Through the figure of Sony Sweden's CEO, Per Sundin, we discover the face of record labels battered by piracy and forced into hundreds of layoffs, while through that of Bobbie (Janice Kavander), conversely, we see the face of the artists, subjugated to those same labels both before and after the advent of Spotify.

It is Petra Hansson (Gizem Erdogan) and Andreas Ehn (Joel Lutzow), however, who offer the most compelling perspectives: the former, a lawyer, through the daring negotiations over rights and revenue between Spotify and the record labels, and the latter through his digital inventions, creating the perfect streaming platform together with his sizeable crew of nerds and programmers.

The six episodes of "The Playlists" differ not only in the themes they tackle, but also in the styles they adopt, genuinely creating a compilation-like effect that lends further meaning to the series' title. The Petra Hansson played by the excellent Gizem Erdogan (well known to fans of other Swedish series such as "Califfato" and "Amore e anarchia") thus becomes the protagonist of a legally-charged episode, as wordy and frantic as a Sorkin script, while the spontaneous Spotify co-founder, Christian Hillborg's Martin Lorentzon, recounts himself on the radio as if in an honest, foul-mouthed podcast.

The soundtrack is equally varied, following as it does the personal tastes of the various characters. While not particularly original in its choices, the playlist of "The Playlists" (forgive the terrible pun) effectively underscores the series' key moments and the emotions they stir up, ranging freely from Aretha Franklin to Royksopp, from Avicii to Earth, Wind And Fire, from the Psychedelic Furs to Daft Punk, and so on.

Rhetorical shortcomings aside, as noted at the outset, "The Playlists" is a solid miniseries, thoroughly entertaining and packed with information, drawn as it is from a book based on thousands of interviews with Spotify insiders. A fine audiovisual crash course on the invention that ushered in the digital era and changed the music market and how society as a whole listens to music, as well as further proof of the quality of one of Netflix's best outposts: the Swedish one.

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