John Seabrook Quotes & Sayings

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. — John Seabrook

The very first hit factory was T.B. Harms, a Tin Pan Alley publishing company overseen by Max Dreyfus. With staff writers like Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers, T.B. Harms was the dominant publisher of popular music in the early twentieth century. Dreyfus called his writers "the boys" and installed pianos for them to compose on around the office on West Twenty-Eighth, the street that gave Tin Pan Alley its name, allegedly for the tinny-sounding pianos passersby heard from the upper-story windows of the row houses. The sheet-music sellers also employed piano players in their street-level stores, who would perform the Top 40 of the 1920s for browsing customers. — John Seabrook

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. — John Seabrook

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. — John Seabrook

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. — John Seabrook

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. — John Seabrook

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. — John Seabrook

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. — John Seabrook

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. — John Seabrook

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. — John Seabrook

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, — John Seabrook

Far more people die in the developing world than in the West. At religious festivals mainly. That's not a myth - the numbers don't lie. I think it's just because in the West crowds tend to be manufactured by commercial interesting, and they have, or at least should have, a responsibility for keeping people safe. — John Seabrook

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. — John Seabrook

on the Internet, shelf space is infinite, — John Seabrook

The net poses a fundamental threat not only to the authority of the government, but to all authority, because it permits people to organize, think, and influence one another without any institutional supervision whatsoever. — John Seabrook

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. — John Seabrook

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. — John Seabrook

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. — John Seabrook

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

I don't think you can hold someone accountable for trampling someone else, because that person was probably pushed from behind. But if someone picks your pocket in a crowd, it's no different from any other act of that kind, in another situation. — John Seabrook

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

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. — John Seabrook

We live in a consumer culture, and Black Friday is like the July 4th of that culture. It might be good not to live in this culture, but it terms of what we can do to make people safer at big sales, it seems more useful to try to avoid dangerous crowd conditions. — John Seabrook

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. — John Seabrook

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

Don't Shoot is a work of moral philosophy that reads like a crime novel - Immanuel Kant meets Joseph Wambaugh. It's a fascinating, inspiring, and wonderfully well written story of one man's quest to solve a problem no one thought could be solved: the scourge of inner city gang violence This is a vitally important work that has the potential to usher in a new era in policing. — 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. — John Seabrook

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. — 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. — John Seabrook

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. — John Seabrook

Crowds of minds can be wise, but crowds of bodies just aren't. — John Seabrook