They revolutionized the music industry – now a movie
The company that changed the music industry will now be a movie! Netflix has started an untitled series about Swedish startup Spotify telling the story of how two young tech entrepreneurs, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon with partners, started a small-scale company that came to become one of the world’s leading music services. The series will be in six parts and will be available 2022.
The basis for the music revolution was to offer free and legal streamed music. Until Spotify, a concept unheard of. The series is based on a book “Spotify Untold” by Swedish business reporters Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud and it will be produced by Yellow Bird UK, owned by the Banijay Group. Director is Norwegian Per-Olav Sørensen, know from “Home for Christmas” and “Quicksand”.
Spotify was started in 2006 by Ek and Lorentzon who both had made some money on internet advertising during the first internet boom. The music industry was in a mess with growing illegal online sharing of music and a market that was hesitating to pay when so much music was available out there for free – illegally but anyway…
This is when Ek and Lorentzon came up with the idea: legally stream the music instead of owning recordings!
DYLAN AND SWIFT
The original idea was a free and advertising financed service but after pressure from the music industry, a subscription service was introduced. Spotify started streaming some two years after the starting of the company. Ek and Lorentzon had by then been on an extensive road-show around the music business to explain their idea.
Not all were happy to start with and the company has had some animated discussions with music stars like Bob Dylan and Tailor Swift.
STOCK EXCHANGE
However, in 2011 Spotify was launched in the US. By 2017, the company’s services were available in 61 counties and had some 140 million users of which 60 million were paying subscribers. The same year, Spotify made a deal with Chinese Tencent. In a share swop, Spotify became owner of 9% of Tencent Music Entertainment and Tencent got 7.5% of Spotify, later increased to 9.2%.
In 2018, Spotify was introduced at the stock exchange in New York and valued at USD 5.2 billion . The founders and some employees, with share options, became millionaires.
STOCKHOLM OFFICE
Starring in the series are Swedish actors Edvin Endre as Daniel Ek and Christian Hillborg as Martin Lorentzon.
Netflix earlier this year announced that it is opening a production company for the Nordics based in Stockholm with a smaller side office in Copenhagen.
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