Spotify’s billionaire CEO has a broken profit record to fix

It’s 15 years since Sweden’s Spotify Technology, co-founded by Daniel Ek, launched its music streaming service as a legal all-you-can-eat middle ground between online piracy or paying $20 for an album. At the time, the music industry was slashing jobs and struggling with the MP3’s rise: In the digital domain, “copies are not just cheap, they are free,” technologist Kevin Kelly wrote in 2008.

Today, Ek is a billionaire, and streaming has helped the music biz get back to its pre-MP3 size. Yet Spotify is now cutting 1,500 jobs as the industry’s foundations get rocked again. Even with more than half a billion unique users,