Stuffy stream – Newspaper Kommersant No. 192 (7393) dated 10/17/2022

Per-Olav Sørensen’s The Playlist, a series dedicated to the history of the largest digital music platform Spotify, is available to watch on Netflix. The series is based on the book “The Untold Story of Spotify” by Sven Karlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud (which was published in Russia under the title “Against the Giants: How Spotify Moved Apple and Changed the Music Industry”). Boris Barabanov believes that the Playlist is not only a living history of the music industry of the 21st century, but also an original serial construction.

Unlike David Fincher’s classic technobiopic The Social Network, which chronicled the rise of Facebook (banned in Russia), or the recent WeWork co-working network series It Didn’t Work with Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway, Playlist is not the story of a lone genius. . The founder of the Swedish music service Spotify, Daniel Ek, is one of the six main characters in the six-episode “Playlist”. Most of them, like Ek, are real people, presented on screen under their real names. These are Spotify co-founders financier Martin Laurentson and coder Andreas En, as well as the head of the Swedish division of Sony Music Per Sundin and Spotify lawyer Petra Hansson.

The only fictional character is singer Bobby T, Ek’s high school girlfriend and the collective image of the thousands of musicians who put their music on Spotify and are forced to go to “normal” jobs because they don’t have enough income from streaming to pay their rent – “you can’t pay your rent with likes” .

However, the creators of the series did not limit themselves to the fictional story of Bobby Tee, who led the movement of musicians protesting the unfair distribution of rewards from streaming. It also tells about a real conflict with Taylor Swift, who took all her tracks from the platform in 2016 (the same story was with Thom Yorke from Radiohead, but it did not fit in the series). And here the focus suddenly shifts – at a meeting with the representative of the singer, who came to establish relations, Martin Lorentson suddenly takes an uncompromising position and literally is rude to the guest. In a series entirely dedicated to Laurentson, it gradually becomes clear that his charm and super-communicative skills have a downside – a mental disorder.

Choosing a form known from Kurosawa’s Rashomon (each character tells the Spotify story in their own way), the Playlist explores the hidden psychological deformations of each of the characters, whether it be Per Sundin’s pathological conservatism, Petra Hansson’s hyper-vanity, or Daniel Ek’s stubbornness in half with self-confidence. The breakdown within each of them becomes the driving force of the startup, and the sum of their complexes leads to the personal success of each and the triumph of the entire company.

The only exception is the genius programmer Andreas En, the only one in the team who is not capable of compromise and does not agree to let the capital of large recording companies into the business of the new platform. Having created the perfect player, he leaves the company to travel the world with his bartender lover. It seems that he is the only one of the heroes who is truly happy, although he looks like a shy quiet person.

In addition to the non-standard form of narration, in accordance with which the characters pass the word to each other like a baton, there is another unexpected twist in the Playlist, which is implemented in the sixth series – The Artist. To reveal this move is to deprive the reader of 48 minutes of pleasure. But with all confidence we can say that it is in this series that the main idea of ​​​​the series is revealed. Neither Spotify nor Netflix are currently available in Russia. However, the idea that we live in a world whose structure is understandable only to a few is understandable everywhere.

The principle of distribution of income from listening to music on Spotify between the platform, copyright holders, record labels and artists is still a secret with seven seals. For each contract it is different. Therefore, the topic of performers’ dissatisfaction with this distribution does not lose its relevance, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, during which concert life practically stopped. And in principle, only a few people have access to secret knowledge about the principles of operation of, say, a smartphone that is in your pocket. This topic is covered in the Coder series, in which the dialogues almost entirely consist of technical terms. At the same time, it is important to understand that these devices, programs and algorithms were created by living people with different characters, people who can make mistakes and are subject to stress. In this they are no different from the inventors of the bicycle or the atomic bomb.