Tommy Boy Can CD Future

The president of Tommy Boy Records punches up the demo tape. She is white, 36 years old, and female, but Monica Lynch enjoys a reputation for unerring taste in the mostly black, largely teen, sometimes macho world of hip hop - the culture of graffiti, breakdancing, and rap that first appeared in the South Bronx in the late 1970s and now constitutes a billion-dollar industry.

In the record business, R&D is called A&R - artists and repertoire - and finding new acts and guiding existing ones is its lifeblood. Lynch settles back to listen. Despite the avalanche of tapes that regularly descends on her, she looks hopeful, unjaded. In a covering note, the independent producer has described the 23-year-old rapper-singer on the tape as a "ghetto princess from South Central L.A. giving an around-the-way-girl's view of growing up in the 'hood." He thinks she has the potential to "blow up" bigger than the platinum-selling hardcore rapper Ice Cube.

The first two tracks belie the buildup. Sweet horn sections and a female chorus give the songs a saccharine, pop feel. Lynch finds the vocals undistinguished, the lyrics trite, the rapping lame.

"There is a historical consumer bias against women rappers to begin with," she explains. "Those who do break through tend to be harder core. This artist would be competing with The Boss and Le Shaun, who not only talk hard but have a sound that grabs you by the balls. I just don't know who would buy this."

The final track proves to be a pop-gospel version of the old Doris Day warhorse "Que Sera Sera." Lynch grimaces and smiles wanly. Mercifully, she stops the tape.

"This is, in short, embarrassing," she says, "a what-the-hell-does-this-have-to-with-anything track. Unfortunately, it's representative of a lot of tracks that come in. You look for a point of view. Artists sometimes describe themselves as versatile. That's the kiss of death. Somebody who wants to be all things to all people ends up being nothing to no one."

Lynch has known the producer for 10 years and values the relationship, but she will meet with him the following day and tell him gently, but firmly, that the label isn't interested. Tommy Boy wants artists with vision.

Vision of another sort consumes Tom Silverman, 39, chairman and founder of the 12-year-old label based in New York: he dreams of finding out what makes an individual consumer need to own a specific record. Working in temporary space while his new offices are completed, he studies the latest figures from Sound Scan, a 2-year-old company that (for the first time in the industry's history) provides record labels with accurate, up-to-the-minute sales figures.

Every week Sound Scan's computer network, tied to the barcode scanners of retailers throughout the United States, breaks out detailed record sales information by title, label, musical genre, configuration (single or album; vinyl, cassette, or CD), market, type of store, label market share, and more. Since it came online, Sound Scan has been blowing away the industry's secrecy and hype faster than CDs vanquished vinyl. Talk about a revolution: the charts no longer lie; everyone knows exactly how their rivals are doing; and studious executives like Silverman, who tease new meanings from the numbers and act on them creatively, can neutralize the bigger labels' advantages of size and money.

Silverman calls Sound Scan "the I Ching of the record business." The book of changes.

"What I'm trying to do is really learn the dynamics of how people buy records and how records are sold," he says, paging through a computer analysis of album sales. "There are three different levels to it. This is the gross analysis: how many units of what are selling, where they're selling, when they're selling. We can identify the buying power index of each market. New York buys 7.7% of all rap records; Los Angeles buys 6.3%; San Francisco buys 6.2%. Those are things I can tell now.

"In a couple of years we're going to be able to find out from Sound Scan who bought what. They're going to start a frequent buyer program with major retail outlets. People will have a membership card so every time they make a purchase their card is scanned. We'll know who bought each record - name, address, age, sex, ethnicity. It's going to blow everyone's mind.

"The third and last level is the psychosociology of how people buy. What makes them have to own the record? We do focus groups. But what we can't get to is this: what clicks in someone's head that says, `I have to have that record; it has to be part of my collection.'"

Silverman isn't sure how he'll get to that elusive third level, but one thing is certain: if there's a way, he'll find it. For just as Lynch is known on the streets for her cultural savvy, Silverman is known in the suites for supplanting the industry's traditional illusions with bracing doses of mathematical reality.