2022 - 2022
The Playlist landed on Netflix in October 2022 with almost no marketing push outside Sweden, which is a shame because this six-episode limited series is one of the smarter tech-origin shows of the streaming era. It tells the story of how Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon built Spotify out of a Stockholm office in the late 2000s, turning a pirate-era mess into the legal music-streaming platform that now defines how most of the world listens to music.
The source is Spotify Untold, the 2019 non-fiction book by Swedish journalists Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud. Director Per-Olav Sørensen and writer Christian Spurrier adapt that reporting into a confident, clearly-made prestige drama that clocks in at just under six hours total and respects the viewer's time.
Six episodes. One story. Six different people telling it.
The show's central gimmick is its best idea. Each of the six episodes retells roughly the same period of Spotify's early history from the point of view of a different character. The founder gets his episode. So does the co-founder. So does the coder, the lawyer, the industry executive on the other side of the negotiating table, and a fictional artist called Bobbi T.
Crucially, each episode is presented as that character's subjective version of events. Scenes get replayed with different emphasis. Conversations you watched in episode one come back in episode three with a completely different colour. The founder's heroic pitch meeting becomes, seen from the industry side, a young chancer overpromising to a room of people who know exactly what he is doing.
The show closes with an on-screen disclaimer that people and scenes have been partly dramatised. That honesty matters. This is not a documentary, and it does not pretend to be.
Edvin Endre anchors the whole thing as Daniel Ek. He plays Ek as quiet, coiled, and a lot more calculating than the public-facing mythology tends to admit. Christian Hillborg is very good as Martin Lorentzon, the older co-founder with the money and the contacts, who keeps the room calm when Ek is being difficult.
The supporting bench is where the show really earns its stripes:
Kavander is the controversial casting decision, because Bobbi T is the controversial idea. More on that in a moment.
Christian Hillborg
Martin Lorentzon
Janice Kavander
Bobbi T
Sheherazade Makhloufi
Supporting
Ulf Stenberg
Per Sundin (Sony Music Sweden)
Björn Stenbäck
Ludvig Strigeus
Joel Lützow
Andreas Ehn
Per-Olav Sørensen
Director
Jibril Faraj
Supporting
The "artist's episode" is where The Playlist either impresses you or frustrates you, and for a lot of critics it did both at once. Bobbi T is not a real person. The writers built her as a composite of several real artists' grievances about streaming economics, bundled into a fictional R&B singer so the show can make its most pointed argument about Spotify payouts without libelling anyone specific.
On one hand, this is neat. It lets the show voice the artist-rights case loudly, put the counter-case to Ek and Lorentzon in dramatic form, and end on a note of genuine unease. On the other hand, it is a hedge. The real named artists who have loudly criticised Spotify for years get replaced by a safe fictional stand-in. The show wants to raise the question without quite answering it.
The show closes its most important argument with a composite character and an on-screen disclaimer. Clever television. Careful journalism.
Your mileage will depend on how much you want a prestige drama to commit to an angle. I thought the Bobbi T episode was the weakest of the six but also the one I thought about for longest afterwards, which might be the point.
Visually the show is confident without being flashy. Stockholm in the late 2000s gets a crisp, slightly washed palette. Cramped offices, desktop towers, whiteboards covered in scribbled product specs. The music choices land on obvious picks but use them well.
Sørensen stages the negotiation scenes with real patience. He lets people sit in silence. He lets a lawyer read a clause out loud and actually care what is in it. For a show about software and contracts, the craft level is unusually high.
The writing holds up under the Rashomon pressure. Each episode has to be the same story and a different story, which means the writers' room had to map every scene twice and know in advance which version you were seeing. Christian Spurrier and his team do not drop the ball.
Critics broadly liked it. The structure got most of the praise, along with Endre's central performance. The main knock was the Bobbi T episode, which divided reviewers between those who thought it was a brave move and those who thought it was a dodge. Swedish press took a closer interest in the real-life accuracy than the international press did, which makes sense. The show did decent but not blockbuster numbers on Netflix and was always positioned as a prestige limited piece rather than a franchise seed.
If you line it up against its obvious peers, it sits higher than most. The Dropout is the best of the recent tech-founder wave and The Playlist belongs in that same conversation. Inventing Anna plays as a more ragged, pulpier watch. Silicon Valley is doing an entirely different thing but shares the same affection for the actual engineers in the room. And anyone who enjoyed Black Mirror on the question of how consumer tech reshapes the people who use it will find plenty to chew on here.
The Playlist works because it is small. Six episodes. One company. A handful of rooms. A structural gimmick used with discipline, not as a crutch. Most tech-founder dramas want to be The Social Network and end up being a Wikipedia page with pretty lighting. This one knows it cannot be The Social Network and aims for something better suited to television, which is to use six hours to show six different people being right at once about slightly different things.
It is also honest about what it is not. It does not claim to be the final word on Spotify, on streaming, or on Daniel Ek. It tells you up front that it has dramatised. It ends on doubt rather than triumph. That alone puts it above most of the genre.
Watch it if you liked The Dropout. Watch it if you have ever wondered who actually wins when a tech company and a legacy industry finally sign the deal. Six hours of grown-up television. Worth your evening.
Manuel Broman
Niklas Ivarsson
Gizem Erdogan
Petra Hansson
Edvin Endre
Daniel Ek