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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • Sweden only made the change gradually about a century ago, with it happening first in urban areas. The merchant Clas Ohlson, after whom the dry goods chain is named, was the son of Olle something-other-than-Ohlson, and the first in his line to make their surname a family name.

    Surnames that describe the individual (“son of Olaf”, “the blacksmith”, “from up the river”) work fine in small-scale societies, but are a problem for bureaucracies and other systems. IIRC, a lot of the pressure for standardised family names in Europe was to make things like taxation and conscription more manageable.
















  • They own a big chunk (possibly a majority) of Spotify and extract hefty licensing fees from it. (Spotify moving into podcasting was apparently intended to find a market in which they could keep the profits.) The majors get far better licensing terms than indie labels or small artists would get, because they have the whip hand: Spotify has no choice but to pay up as not to become a platform without Taylor Swift/Ed Sheeran/Baby Shark/etc., which would effectively wipe them out.

    Make no mistake, the three major labels (Warner, Sony and Universal) are reaping the vast majority of profits from Spotify.