About The Playlist
The Playlist is a 2022 Swedish drama series produced for Netflix that dramatizes the founding and rise of the music-streaming company Spotify. Inspired by the book Spotify Untold by journalists Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud, the six-episode series traces how a small group of Stockholm entrepreneurs, coders, and dealmakers set out to build a legal alternative to music piracy in the late 2000s. Edvin Endre stars as co-founder Daniel Ek, the young programmer and serial entrepreneur whose conviction that streaming could save the music industry drives the company forward.
Rather than telling a single linear story, each episode is told from a different perspective, reframing the same events through the eyes of a new participant. The chapters follow the visionary founder, the business partner and financier, the company lawyer, the lead coder, the music-industry executive, and the artist whose livelihood is reshaped by the new model. This Rashomon-style structure lets the series examine the launch of Spotify as both a triumphant startup story and a more complicated reckoning with how streaming changed the economics of music for the people who make it.
Christian Hillborg plays Martin Lorentzon, the wealthy entrepreneur and co-founder who bankrolls the venture and brings dealmaking muscle to negotiations with the major record labels. Gizem Erdogan appears as company lawyer Petra Hansson, who must untangle the licensing battles that stand between the startup and the world's music catalog. The ensemble dramatizes the high-stakes meetings, technical breakthroughs, and personal costs behind a product that would go on to reshape how the world listens to music.
