112k: Average number of songs uploaded to music streaming services every day of the first half of 2023, per Quartz, which links the staggering number to the rise of Pro Tools and other software that allow musicians to record from home studios.
$222.1B: The record amount US shoppers spent online between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31, up 4.9% YoY, per Adobe Analytics. BNPL payment companies, such as Klarna, saw a 14% spike over the holidays as economic uncertainty continued.
133 pounds: The weight of the wels catfish Tomas Marcinkevicius recently caught in Cambridgeshire, smashing the previous 62-pound records. Why the big gap? The British Record Fish Committee halted record-taking for wels catfish from October 2000 to November 2023 over concerns of illegal imports of big catfish, but now the self-sustaining species is growing plenty large on its own. Still, Marcinkevicius isn’t interested in claiming the record, saying he knows of even bigger catfish caught during that period.
$15B: How much consumers loaded onto Starbucks cards in 2023, per a complaint from the Washington Consumer Protection Coalition, a consumer watchdog organization that claims the coffee giant manipulates users into reloading funds onto its payment app while making it difficult to zero out accounts. The group is asking Washington’s attorney general to investigate the practice, which it claims netted Starbucks $900m over the last five years. Starbucks disputes these claims.
