The Playlist

Building Spotify meant solving several problems that did not belong to the same profession. The Playlist revisits the company's beginnings through perspectives including technology, business and music, allowing the same ambition to look different depending on who has to make it work.

That shifting viewpoint is the series' useful distinction. A convenient product for a listener creates questions about rights, payment and control for other people. The technical challenge is only one part of getting the service into the world.

This is dramatised television, with interpretation and invention rather than a complete record of the company's history. It is most interesting as a story about incompatible priorities around a product that appears simple to its user. The Dropout provides another business drama, concerned with a very different gap between a persuasive pitch and practical reality.