People love to hate tech villains. It will not harm Spotify.

'The Playlist' is like other TV shows that follow the founders to their eventual success, except Spotify faces no messy implosion .

Daniel Ek, Spotify founder and current CEO, attends a US Senate committee hearing. Or rather: a Swedish actor playing Ek sits in front of a Senate audience, as imagined by a Swedish production designer. A fictional senator named Landy grills him, hard. “Your business model just doesn't work for musicians, does it? " she asks. Her tone makes it clear that she already knows the answer Ek would give if he were willing to tell the truth. As she peppers him with facts and figures about Spotify's market share and artists' meager revenue cut, Ek attempts to fire back, insisting that his streaming service, whatever its shortcomings, remains the best way forward for musicians hoping to make a living. of their art. But the more Landy presses, the more Ek looks shaken, as if he didn't expect the interrogation to be so difficult. There's a moment when it seems like he's considering the possibility that his criticisms have some merit: maybe, for all his company's rhetoric about artist freedom, he's really just a new breed of monopolist from the music industry.

After Ek, ​​the committee calls Bobbi T, a fictional musician and, coincidentally, a childhood friend of Ek. She appears as a representative of Scratch the Record, a musicians' advocacy group calling on Spotify to distribute more of its revenue to artists whose work forms the core of its platform. Her own songs are streamed 200,000 times a month, but she struggles to get by. She understands, she says, that "in every generation, there are winners and losers." But lawmakers, she insists, should be able to “differentiate between change and exploitation.” Ek, seated in the audience, looks like he'd rather be somewhere, anywhere, else.

These scenes appear in the sixth and final episode of " The Playlist", a new Netflix series that chronicles Spotify's journey from brainstorming Ek in Stockholm to becoming a global streaming giant. The first five episodes, inspired by a book by two Swedish journalists, have the same narrative form as virtually every show or movie that fictionalizes the true story of a tech startup. Socially alienated coders with a bold vision? Check. An open-plan office with a table football? Check. Industry leaders who simply don't understand the drastic change that is coming (until they are forced into it)? Fundraising issues? Just-in-time software breakthroughs? Check, check, check.

This latest installment, however, completely abandons the source material , zooming into a fictional near future: Ek's big Senate hearing takes place in the year 2025. That future may look a lot like the present, but it's in many ways as fanciful as anything in "Star Trek" or " The Jetsons". .” It's a world in which people are moved by the opinions of musicians who aren't megastars, and there's a threat of legislative action that could conceivably help bands replace the lost revenue stream from physical albums. It's a future in which Spotify is bigger than ever - but battle lines are being drawn and they're making Daniel Ek sweat.

We love underdog stories who, armed only with the strength of their vision and their perseverance, strike hard and change society. The business world was a bit too slow, complex and impersonal for this kind of story. But tech start-ups — with their meteoric overnight successes, unconventional young founders, and groundbreaking products — have changed that, creating a new well of David-beating-Goliath stories.

Of course, we now know that many Davids of technology ended up becoming their own Goliaths, creating at least as many problems as they ever solved. Others, we learned, were mere hucksters, plying their trade at the intersection of fashionable venture capital and loose regulatory structures. None of this has dulled our appetite for stories of the technological underdog. We still want the pleasure of seeing David outsmart slow...