Netflix is Developing a Series That Will Tell The Story of Spotify's Creation
Netflix is set to produce a new series about the creation of the music streaming service Spotify, which has become one of the world’s leading music services. Much like Netflix has become one of the world’s leading entertainment streaming services.
The series is inspired by the book Spotify Untold by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud. There’s no title for the series yet, but it will be directed by Per-Olav Sørensen (Quicksand).
The series will shoot in both English and Swedish and it will follow “young Swedish tech entrepreneur Daniel Ek and his partner, Martin Lorentzon, who revolutionized the music industry at a turbulent time when it was being damaged by piracy and controlled by heavy-hitters who were fighting each other for a bigger piece of the pie. The pair took the industry by storm by offering free and legal streamed music around the world.”
Netflix also said that the series will be “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.” Leijonhufvud previously had this to say:
“The rise of Spotify is one of the greatest stories to come out of Sweden in the past 10 years. It’s a saga of a young founder who came out of nowhere and beat Apple at their own game.”
Levin added:
“The story of how a small band of Swedish tech industry insiders transformed music – how we listen to it and how it’s made – is truly a tale for our time. Not only is this a story about the way all our lives have changed in the last decade, it’s about the battle for cultural and financial influence in a globalized, digitized world.”
I like these kinds of stories. I don’t know much about Spotify’s story, but I’d definitely be interested in watching a series about how it came to exist and become the success that it is.
Director Sørensen went on to say that the story of Spotify was an “ongoing fairy tale in modern history about how Swedish whiz kids changed the music industry forever.” He also said that the series would be a challenge “because the Spotify story has not ended yet – it is still running with high speed and will probably change while we work on the project.”
I included the description of the book that the series will be based on below:
On a hot summer’s eve in 2011, Daniel Ek, the whiz kid CEO of Spotify, is lavishly celebrating the hard-earned US launch of his company in San Francisco, after more than a year of delays. Only fifteen minutes away lies the modest brick house that belongs to Steve Jobs, who has worked hard to stop this moment from ever happening.
Only six months earlier, the tech war between the Apple iPhone and Android is raging, and Steve Jobs sees downloaded music, kept within his software, as the key in his ‘holy war’ against Google. But now, the battle lines have been redrawn. A new challenger, with humble origins as a Swedish start-up, has successfully launched in the US, using a different tactic. Spotify had catapulted to the top of the music streaming world, using the threat of piracy and illegal downloading to get the notoriously hard-lined music labels to sign with them. But if Daniel Ek thought that the fight was won that summer’s night, he would soon come to learn that one won battle doesn’t win a war.
In the vein of Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber and Adam Lashinsky’s Inside Apple, investigative tech journalists Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud deliver a behind the scenes exposé of how the prodigy university drop-out Daniel Ek and his financial partner Martin Lorentzon would bet everything on the power of an idea, creating Sweden’s hottest start-up. Based on hundreds of interviews, along with previously untapped sources, SPOTIFY UNTOLD is a David vs Goliath story about how hard convictions, unrelenting will and big dreams can help small players take on tech titans.