John Seabrook

“They told me exactly how it worked, the marketing of it. Our target market was always going to be young teenage girls, because boys are into sports, and they like buying jerseys and caps and so on, for baseball or football, things of that nature, whereas the girls are totally enthralled with the band. . . . They don’t have money, but they have access to a large supply of it: their aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, who would spend money on them for a concert or merchandise sooner than they would spend it on themselves.”

“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 Twenties and Thirties, refrigerated railcars allowed growers to transport apples over great distances, and, thanks to cold-storage warehouses, wholesalers and retailers could keep them for long periods of time.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“By the time of the Civil War, there were many kinds of apples growing across the United States, but most of them didn't taste very good, and as a rule, people didn't eat them. Cider was cheaper to make than beer, and many settlers believed fermented drinks were safer than water. Everyone drank hard cider.”

“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.”

“Spotify appeared nine years after Napster, the pioneering file-sharing service, which unleashed piracy on the record business and began the cataclysm that caused worldwide revenues to decline from a peak of twenty-seven billion dollars in 1999 to fifteen billion in 2013.”

“Lundin says, “Denniz was an arrangement genius.” He adds, “like Steve Jobs, he knew what to take out. ‘You can get rid of that, that. Keep it simple.’ ” As Denniz put it, “A great pop song should be interesting, in some way. That means that certain people will hate it immediately and certain people will love it, but only as long as it isn’t boring and meaningless. Then it’s not a pop song any longer; then it’s something else. It’s just music.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Although the flagship brand, Pepsi-Cola, has always been second to Coca-Cola, the Frito-Lay division is ten times larger than its largest competitor, Diamond Foods, Inc., of San Francisco. Its products take up whole aisles at Walmart.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”