american-english
These company names are collective nouns. In general, in American English collective nouns almost always trigger singular verb agreement (after all, "Microsoft" is grammatically a singular noun, even if semantically it denotes an entity made up of many people). It is apparently much more common to use plural verb agreement in British English. It doesn't have anything to do with the size of the company.
Lots of good information here: Language Log on collective nouns, etc.
Music is an uncountable noun in most senses: that is a word that refers to a group or an amount of something, or to some broad concept that there cannot be two of.
Music is an art or a human category of sounds; it is not a particular instance of something related to this art. For such an instance, you could use piece of music, song, number, movement, ballad, ouverture, etc., depending on what kind of instance you were thinking of.
The same applies to nouns like water: you can't say "I have two waters for you" (except in special circumstances), but rather "two gallons of water", or "two cups of water". Nor could you say "I have many loves for you", or "could you move a couple of sands closer to the beach". A few instances of common uncountable nouns:
- a piece of music
- a piece of information
- a piece of advice
- a grain/pinch of salt
- a piece of furniture
- a piece/scrap of paper
- a blade/patch of grass
- a piece/log of wood
As you see, specific kinds of instances of uncountable nouns can be indicated by different countable nouns, such as piece, grain, patch, etc. Some of these uncountable nouns can be countable if used in a different sense. Note that it is not always obvious from meaning whether a noun is countable or not: to some extent that is something that needs to be learnt word by word, alas.
Best Answer
In British English, to say lettuces (and to speak of cabbages and kings and so forth) is entirely conventional. whereas in American English, lettuce is typically uncountable, and lettuces only used when referring to different types of lettuce, in the same way we can say peoples or cereals.
For natural units of lettuce, we would say
[aside: despite BrE being okay with pluralizing lettuce, it seems that what Americans know as mashed potatoes is called mashed potato, and, n.b. to the marketing director, to see it advertised as such in the hotel restaurant's Thanksgiving Day special makes the Yankee visitor more homesick, not less].
For many fruits and vegetables, the name for the food as a mass noun corresponds to the name for an individual example of it. A recipe might instruct you to add one grated carrot or to add 100cc of grated carrot. You can slice up half a pineapple to add more pineapple to a fruit salad.
For vegetables where only the leaves (lettuce, kale, arugula, broccoli, watercress, endive, collard greens, spinach, chard, cauliflower, escarole, cabbage, mustard greens, etc.) or stalks (asparagus, celery, rhubarb) or other sub-components are consumed, however, there is no such correspondence. We ask for bunches of bibb lettuce or watercress (a conventional supermarket bunch measuring around 1 pound) or heads of cabbage or broccoli; and ears of corn (maize) as Gary's Student has noted.
Where the consumed specimens are granular and consumed en masse, the foodstuff is pluralized— an individual pea, but two cups of peas, not pea, and the same for foods like lentils and beans, berries, scallions, leeks, and smaller mushrooms.
This may be analogized to meat; meat, seafood, and poultry are generally mass nouns (lamb, squid, pheasant) unless speaking of an entire animal (ten oxen, six octopuses, fifty quail).
Garlic is one exception (I am sure there are others). It is sold in bulbs consisting of cloves, but neither unit would be pluralized as garlics.