Quotes from John Seabrook

Like Honeycrisp, SweeTango has much larger cells than other apples, and when you bite into it, the cells shatter rather than cleaving along the cell walls, as is the case with most popular apples. The bursting of the cells fills your mouth with juice. Chunks of SweeTango snap off in your mouth with a loud cracking sound.

MTV refers to its audience as 'the demo.' Being 'in the demo' means being in the demographic sweet spot that advertisers want their programming to hit, which is ideally between 18 and 24.

The people at MTV are encouraged to be very confrontational and declarative about their tastes.

Daniel Ek, the C.E.O. of Spotify, is a rock star of the tech world, but he is not long on charisma.

When you take the individual out of the equation, then you're making programming based on some marketer's idea of what will sell, and not based on the idea of what an individual would like.

Although a crisp texture is the single most prized quality in an apple - even more desirable than taste, according to one study - crispness is more a matter of acoustics than of mouth feel.

Pepsi is the second-most-recognized beverage brand in the world after Coke, and eighteen of PepsiCo's other brands, which include Tropicana, Gatorade, and Quaker Oats, are billion-dollar businesses in their own right.

In the nineteen-eighties, rates of obesity started to rise sharply in the U.S. and around the world. By the nineteen-nineties, obesity reached epidemic proportions.

I do think that television, in its early years, played a significant role in that standard-setting, enforcing a certain decency among people. They took their role seriously, and the people behind the camera took their role seriously, too.

PepsiCo is the largest food-and-beverage company in the United States, and the second-largest in the world after Nestle. If PepsiCo were a country, the size of its economy - sixty billion dollars in revenues in 2010 - would put it sixty-sixth in gross national product, between Ecuador and Croatia.

Clothes are not so much about who you are as who you want to be.

The difference between Spotify and Internet radio services like Pandora is that Spotify is interactive. You can sample the complete catalogue of most artists' recordings.

When Spotify launched in the U.S. in 2011, it relied on simple usage-based algorithms to connect users and music, a process known as 'collaborative filtering.' These algorithms were more often annoying than useful.

there are only so many times you can listen to the guitar solo in Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" without going a little numb yourself

on the Internet, shelf space is infinite

One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour. VIRGINIA WOOLF, THE WAVES

As was Max's method of demo making, all the hooks in the song were worked up to their finished state, but most of the verses were unfinished, often mere vowel sounds. There was no bridge yet, because, as Lunt puts it, "Max would say, 'If you don't like the song by then, fuck you'—in his polite Swedish way, of course.

The verses build up the tension, and the choruses release it, letting the joy in. After two choruses, there's usually a bridge, also known as "the middle eight," which is a variation on the verse melody, followed by the final chorus and coda.

You can get in a car in Maine and drive all the way to California and hear the same Top 40 songs on the same chain broadcasters," bemoaned the report.

Connection, he explained, was the essence of pop music, according to his boss, Jimmy Iovine: "Jimmy always says it's all about the connection between the artist and the fans," he says. "This whole business, it's just about that connection.

Kotecha says, "I always think in my head, if Max Martin was an American, he would have fizzled out a long time ago. He would have believed his own hype. But because he's Swedish, he's able to contain himself. He just focuses on being the best writer and producer and mentor he can be.

A&R really did involve both artists and repertoire—discovering