Photo Credit: Netflix
Netflix has released the first trailer for its fictional Spotify series called ‘The Playlist.’
The series appears to be taking some cues from The Social Network with a fictional account of Spotify founder Daniel Ek. The story follows Ek’s journey to transform music piracy into music streaming, helping to reshape the entire music industry.
‘The Playlist’ is a six-part miniseries that will debut on October 13 on Netflix. Netflix movie director Per-Olav Sørensen directed the project, while Christian Spurrier wrote the series. What the trailer doesn’t really explore is the aftermath of Spotify and how it impacts the bottom line for artists.
There’s very little talk of unpaid royalties or artists who aren’t happy with their share of the pie. It also takes some liberties with the reality of music streaming at the time. It paints Spotify as the service that revolutionized music streaming–but RealPlayer’s Rhapsody existed well before Spotify.
The two-minute trailer is set to the tune of Swedish DJ Avicii’s “Levels,” and shows Spotify’s early startup culture. According to Netflix, “it is a story about how hard convictions, unrelenting will, access and big dreams can help small players challenge the status quo by evolving the way we can all listen to music.”
‘The Playlist’ is inspired by the book Spotify Untold by Swedish business reporters Sven Carlsson and Johnas Leijohnhufvud. Edvin Endre stars as Daniel Ek, who invented Spotify in 2002 to rival peer-to-peer music sharing platforms like KaZaa and torrent sites like The Pirate Bay.
Endre is joined by Ulf Stenberg as Per Sundin, Gizem Erdogan as Petra Hansson, Joel Lützow as Andreas Ehn, Christian Hillborg as Martin Lorentzon, and Swedish artist Janice Kamya Kavander as Bobbie T.
“‘The Playlist’ is at its very core a story about music,” says director Per-Olav Sørensen. “Portraying in fiction how Spotify changed the music industry is impossible without the perspective of the artists, and our character Bobbie T is representing their voices in this story.”