It’s hard to say whether the stereotypes stem from the regularities of reality or are caused by the generalizations of fiction. Certainly Francis Ford Coppola (and novelist Mario Puzo) drew inspiration from mafia reality to create the Godfather (a horse’s head in bed as a threat?), but surely the flesh-and-blood gangsters imitated it from now on cinemas in the exercise of their criminal activity. In the case of The Sopranos, some redneck gangsters, there’s another big twist: fictional characters imitating other fictional characters.
The series The Playlist (Netflix) tells such an amazingly stereotypical technological success story that we don’t know if the genesis of Spotify (which the series is about) was adapted to the story that after years is already becoming entrenched in the popular imagination perhaps influenced the mythology about the magic of entrepreneurship, or whether the protagonists were legged stereotypes, like the Sopranos, by the same story repeated a thousand times. Perhaps every young tech entrepreneur in the world today, at home, far from San Francisco, is mimicking the archetypal story of tech companies, not unlike that told to us about Apple, Facebook, or Google (and wearing the same worn sweatshirts) . . A story that other audiovisual products like Halt and Catch Fire or The Social Network deal with and that satirizes Silicon Valley.
A still from The Playlist starring Edvin Endre (left) as Daniel Ek, Christian Hillborg as Martin Lorentzon and Gizem Erdogan as Petra Hansson.
In the series (in the series at least), Daniel Ek, co-founder of the music platform, is a programming geek who eats kebabs while stealing songs at home in front of the TV and dreams of changing the world through the internet tsunami. His partner Martin Lorentzon is an investment shark with elegant tailor-made suits, but party-happy, crazy and ambitious. And the office of the up-and-coming green startup is full of long-haired geeks throwing paper balls at each other, putting their feet on the table, making a fuss and, believe it or not, casually dropping in that he’s already an icon of technological entrepreneurship of our time ( and that in the real world he is usually a decorative artifact to add cool to the company on duty). Despite the accumulation of clichés, the series is watched with the pleasure of humming the refrain of a song he knows very well.
The story begins in the middle of the first decade of this century, when the recording industry fell down the abyss opened by file-sharing applications like the pioneering Napster and later others like Audiogalaxy or the Swedish website The Pirate Bay. In Sweden of all places, and not in Silicon Valley, Ek wants to create a legal and much more functional and less cumbersome version of the pirate site that keeps the record companies in suspense. The story, which is already a kind of “hero’s path” of our time, is about young visionaries who have to fight against the skepticism of their environment, obtain licenses and financing in order to be successful worldwide in the end, not without first leaving a good part of his beliefs and its relationships along the way. The digital version of the American dream.
Martin Lorentzon (left) and Daniel Ek, founders of Spotify (in real life).
One of the defining aspects of this story, reserved for the final chapter, is that while Spotify isn’t the hack it was inspired by, it doesn’t offer the best conditions for artists, once again taking away the worst within the bat between big companies and the platform. Importantly, too, Spotify (and this topic, surprisingly, isn’t covered in the series) fundamentally changes not only the way music is produced and distributed, but also the way we hear (or rather consume) it has changed. What many of us discovered with the launch of the platform, apart from the previously unthinkable wonder of having all the music in the world on our smartphone, is that the taste for this art is not just a taste for a few notes, some chords, some was lyrics, but there was also a lot extra-musical: the longing for records, the waiting and saving to get them, or the idea of songs that you read in the music press or knock records in the shops. The fascination for the physical object, its design, the passion for collecting.
All that warm and tangible part of melomania was gobbled up by these Swedish entrepreneurs to present us with the so-called dilemma of choice: paralysis in the face of an overwhelming supply of content, less and less contentment in the face of an ever-increasing number of choices, freedom to embrace the precious Boycotted well of attention. Or that the content becomes just a hop from one song to another, a peck without stopping at anything.
More information
So is the Spotify story a real cliché, or did previous clichés lead to it, or is it the creators of the series (and by extension, us) who have learned to see it that way? It is unknown. Curiously, the production itself participates in this diffuse boundary between the real events and the story generated about them: each chapter is approached from the point of view of a protagonist (the programmer, the investor, the record industry representative, the artists…). And at the end of each chapter, another character appears, facing the camera and telling us “that wasn’t like they told you,” to give his own version in the next episode, thus creating a multi-faceted story to generate. Even if it ends up being as told in The Playlist, we can rest easy: the reality, at least that of the technology business, is as we expect it to be. Or as we were told.
You can follow EL PAÍS TELEVISIÓN on Twitter or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Receive the TV newsletter
All the news from channels and platforms, with interviews, news and analysis, as well as recommendations and criticism from our journalists
SIGN IN
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits