😍 2022-10-14 11:32:18 – Paris/France.
This Swedish fictional mini-series tells the story of the birth of Spotify, the Streaming popular and controversial musical that revolutionized the recording industry. Netflix premiere.
Joining, from Sweden, the trend of series on promotions and, in some cases, the offshoots of several large companies that have emerged thanks to the internet (there are others on Uber, Theranos or WeWork), PLAYLIST tells the story of Spotify and how it has changed the music industry over the past decade. It's a Swedish series because, well, the society is Swedish and the most sensible thing is to tell the story from the specifics of the culture of this country, which has quite a few differences with the American culture to which we are accustomed to this type of story. The series isn't too good or subtle, but it's clear and entertaining enough for viewers to get a taste of how this drastic turn in the recording industry has been.
Daniel Ek (Edvin Endre) is a programmer who is rejected by Google for not having a university degree in the mid-2000s, but with his talent he manages to set up a company that sells advertising via algorithms, reselling it to a biggest dedicated company and get something bigger than the ten million dollars paid to it: the admiration and friendship of Martin Lorentzon (Christian Hillborg), an investor in this type of company who wishes to continue to do business with him. And when Martin asks what the most withdrawn of Ek wants to do, Daniel has the idea of setting up a service of Streaming musical.
The series will be split into six episodes with six different perspectives on the same story, with the final two reaching into the present and even beyond to a hypothetical near future. We'll have the story according to Ek, according to the suspect chairman of Sony Sweden, according to Spotify's persistent lawyer who negotiated the music rights, according to the platform's inflexible lead programmer, according to the intense Lorentzon and according to a singer, old friend of Daniel, who would later lead a claim for better compensation for artists. But perhaps, more than the story itself (which does not escape the typical comings and goings of start-up and the so-called digital "unicorns"), the series serves to review changes in the recording industry.
Spotify appears in the middle of the first decade of the century in which record labels were in free fall mainly due to digital piracy. Although there were several download sites that became popular during this decade (Napster, Kazaa, Soulseek, etc.) or direct downloads, the series focuses on Pirate Bay, also created by Swedish people. What Ek proposes, in the middle of the controversy generated by piracy (very supported in a country with a strong anti-capitalist movement like Sweden is, or was), is a technically better place to listen to music, a place that is immediate and no download required. The question of rights did not seem to be the most worrying then.
But that would become the central theme of the prehistory of Spotify and the series: the negotiations between the platform of Streaming and the record companies, who wanted nothing to do with business models like that (the idea of free music pissed them off), even though they got some of the advertising profits with which the concept was originally organized. The series will deal with these debates, with the internal issues this entailed (some were more radical and others more negotiating within the company), Ek's platform claims being instantaneous (technical discussions are the more interesting) and with the personal problems between the protagonists, which would change over the years and the growth of the company.
PLAYLIST –which is based on the non-fiction book Spotify Unspeakables, by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud– almost completely bypasses the business consolidation stage and after four episodes devoted to the beginning (late 2000) jumps forward several years to analyze the controversies of recent times, especially the one you have with the artists, since most of them get crumbs for their songs available there. None of the topics are analyzed in depth (there are very interesting journalistic notes and books on the changes in the recording industry in the 21st century) and what makes THE PLAYLIST Above all, it is an assessment of this transition from analogue to digital also experienced in journalism, literature, cinema and television. Yet, as the odd last episode makes clear, the matter is far from resolved and there are many unresolved edges. In fact, it will be interesting to see when another platform will tell the story, for example Netflix. On a Spotify podcast perhaps?
SOURCE: Reviews News
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