Hello, will the Swedish book Vemod undercover: Boken om ABBA also appear in English or German?

Thank you…..
Wolfgang//Germany

According to the June 2023 issue of the Official International ABBA Magazine, this book will be published in English and other languages in 2024. I haven’t found any publication details of versions in other languages yet.

Love your site. Looking good after the update. (Already did good look 🙂 )
I have a question.  I am looking for the vocal mixes which have been leaked about 10 years ago.  I have 6 of them but looking for the other ones.  Do you know a place where they can be found? 
Keep up the good work.

Regards
Etienne, Netherlands

Those “vocal mixes” were first posted on YouTube in 2012. The original posts were removed a long time ago. There are copies of them all still on YouTube and elsewhere, mostly mislabeled as “demo” or “first” or “original mix”. Often, they are filtered to separate the vocals even more. I don’t know if the original versions are still out there somewhere.
I wrote about these in the blog just after they first surfaced.
Thank you for those kind words about the site, Etienne.

Question 1:
On the cover of the single ‘Ring Ring’ by Durium Italy in 1973, you can see the name of “ABBA”. Would this be the first time that “ABBA” as a signature appears, or was this single released later in 1974?

Question 2:
ABBA has been rewarded for a billion streamings. Can you tell me what that means in terms of “equivalent sold records”? And what’s their ranking in the streamhitparade? I guess the Beatles are number one…

Thank you
Serge from Brussels

ps: Congratulation for your new website 😉

1. Indeed, when the ‘Ring Ring’ single was released in the UK and Italy in October 1973, these were the first records in the world to feature the name ABBA. The UK single was released on 12 October, the Italian single ten days later on 22 October. Some years ago I wrote about these first ABBA records in the blog.

2. There have been two recent billion-stream milestones:
The Official Chart Company announced that ABBA had achieved 1 billion streams in the UK across their whole career.
‘Dancing Queen’ achieved 1 billion streams worldwide on Spotify. Spotify has a Billions Club playlist of 449 songs, which seems incomplete as ‘Dancing Queen’ is not included.
The number of streams to the equivalent of one sale varies from country to country, and also whether a song is played on a free or premium (subscriber) account, whether it’s a new release or catalogue song, or how long it has been available.
Thanks for the congrats, Serge.

I recently stayed at Benny Andersson’s Rival Hotel in Stockholm. In the bar there was a poster that said “Pay attention *************”. What’s the story and why is this there?

John, USA

Pay Attention is a limited-edition lithograph (50 copies) by American artist Bruce Nauman in 1973. It seems to be from Benny’s personal art collection. Many years ago, some ABBA fan friends told me about visiting Benny and Frida’s home in the late 79s or early 80s, and they described what must have been this lithograph hanging on the wall.