Bloggin' In The Years: 1983

It's a good year for the music biz.

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.

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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.

I hope for its own sake the music industry never feels threatened by people wanting to record their stuff the way the movie industry is over VCRs. I don't think they could handle it if people started trading all their music with each other without paying for it.