Thanks to The Social Network, tech biopics now tend to work from the same blueprint. There is a startup, founded in a fog of resentment by a single obsessive, charismatic visionary. There is a battle to succeed, to show a world resistant to change what the future looks like. And then there is wild victory that comes at a price. For the most part, though, The Playlist (Netflix) avoids this blueprint.The Playlist Season 1 Download
A drama about the creation of Spotify, The Playlist has a perfectly willing visionary in Daniel Ek, the programmer who created the app and quickly became the most powerful man in the global music industry. But Spotify is a Swedish company, and The Playlist is a Swedish show, and that means a little light socialism is in order.Episode one, for instance, is all about Ek, played with tremendous stroppiness by Fortitude’s Edvin Endre. When we meet him, he is trapped in a job he is too good for, hanging out with his mother and being told he is too undereducated for a job at Google. We see him take this frustration and use it to create Spotify, despite widespread obstruction from the music industry, climaxing with a heartrending sequence of him and his programmers finally telling the world about his magical toy that lets you listen to any song for free. If this was a US show, you sense that this would be the entire series. Then, in its dying gasp, another character turns to the camera and says “What the hell? That’s not how it happened.”Immediately we have a much more interesting show. The Playlist has six episodes, all told from the perspective of someone integral to Spotify’s success. Episode two is about a music executive who, terrified by filesharing’s gutting of the industry he loves, relents and gets into bed with Spotify. There is an episode about the app’s chief coder, who battled to strive for a perfection that had never existed before. An episode about the lawyer who laid the groundwork for compromise with record labels. An episode about the money guy. Spotify wasn’t created by one man alone. An entire team was responsible for its success and they each get to put their argument across.