Music: New Rock on a Red-Hot Roll

Sizzling sales have record execs dancin' in the suites

By any standards the summer is a knockout. After four years of slumping sales and stagnating sounds, the pop music industry is once again experiencing a welcome artistic and financial bonanza, one that is making this rock 'n' roll's headiest season of the decade. Says Gil Friesen, president of A&M Records: "People are buying so many albums by new artists, it adds up to a new passion."

The fervor is big business. If the beat continues, record and tape sales will soar some 10% over last year's total of $3.6 billion. Soul Rocker Michael Jackson's No. 1 Thriller may sell 9 million copies by the end of the year. David Bowie's Let's Dance has moved 1 million in just three months, and Synchronicity, the latest album by the Police, has sold 2 million in less than a month.

From 1979 until just a few months ago, many of the ten-to 24-year-olds, who buy 44% of all pop records and tapes, were spending their money in video arcades instead of the stores. Arcade revenues have flattened out, but the music industry has also suffered from rising production costs, huge long-term artists' contracts and an estimated $1 billion in revenues lost to home made recordings on cassette tapes each year. The result: 150 million fewer records and tapes were shipped last year than in the industry's peak year, 1978.

Now a diverse but irresistible mix of sounds had brought the kids back not only to the record racks, but to the clubs and the concerts as well. New Music, a blend of soul, rock, reggae and disco set to a synthesized, whipcrack beat, has them buying and dancing again. The robotic rhythms are not a return to the polyester fever of disco, however. "Disco's out," says Arista Records President Clive Davis, "but dancing isn't."

New Music, by stars like post-punk Adam Ant (Goody Two Shoes) and Boy George (Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?), unknown to most people over 30, is moving millions of adolescent feet. Indeed, all pop music, from heavy metal to soul, is sharing in the revival. Poly-Gram Records Executive Jack Kiernan notes that the recording studios are booked solid again, a sign of long-term stability. Says he: "We're spending for the future."

Why is it happening? One place to ask is your local cable company. Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, MTV, the two-year-old Warner Amex channel, beams rock-'n'-roll videotapes into 14 million homes across the nation. The tapes, from established stars like the Rolling Stones to hopefuls like the Fixx, are offered free by recording companies in return for air play. Their impact has gone far beyond promotional gimmickry. Says PolyGram's Kiernan, whose group Def Leppard went platinum after TV exposure: "You can feel the sales right away."

Costing an average $35,000 to produce, the three-to five-minute clips on Music Television were originally little more than lip-synched concert or studio bits. Now they accompany almost every album and are often mini-epics. Michael Jackson's Beat It is a $150,000, five-minute West Side Story, in which the singer flashdances through a cast of 80 gang members (most of them real Los Angeles street dudes) and 60 scenes to avert a showdown.