How Nashville Goes Pop

Garth Brooks' label, Capitol, chose to go after album sales mainly with an aggressive retail push built on marketing moves — little known to the average record buyer — that influence what customers see and hear in their local record shop. Capitol paid record chains to promote Brooks' No Fences in their stores, for example, by prominently placing the album in display bins ''up front next to Madonna,'' as Joe Mansfield says. This is a common practice in the record industry. ''We buy our way in,'' Mansfield readily admits.

Such retail promotions may be commonplace for pop albums but not for country acts. Capitol's push paid off: After No Fences was released last September, it, too, sold more than 2 million copies. Shortly afterward, Clint Black was able to score pop-chart success once again with his second album, Put Yourself in My Shoes. In the wake of the Country Music Association awards show, still more country acts have edged onto the pop chart, among them Randy Travis, Reba McEntire, the Kentucky Headhunters, George Strait, and Alan Jackson. All this sales success has come without Top 40 airplay. If pop radio ever gets over its fear of country, says one Nashville exec, ''the music industry here could explode.''