ROCK / Taking it to the streets: Market researchers are being hired by record companies to give you what you want. Which is, apparently, Kylie Minogue, Neil Sedaka, Abba and the Shadows. Giles Smith investigates

Kylie Minogue's Greatest Hits album comes out next week, and her record company are quietly confident. They've done their research. They've been out on the street with the sleeve and the track-listing, asking people what they thought about it. Surprisingly, as well as the predictable tots, there's an audience of 25-35 year old mothers out there, just clamouring for this album. Minogue has recently mentioned her desire for an older audience. The market researchers have been out and found her one.

It is hardly surprising that the record industry goes in for market research - all the other consumer industries do - and yet there is something mildly shocking about seeing these tactics attached to music. Still, it's going on everywhere. In the marketing department at WEA, Tony McGuinness has been doing what he calls 'desk research' ahead of the launch next month of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells II. 'We got information on who bought the first one - it did well among students - and we calculated their present age. They're not waiting to buy it; they need to be talked to because it's been 19 years.'

McGuinness used to market toothbrushes and railway freight and beer, and he admits that, within the business, marketing is 'a bit of a dirty word. There's a feeling it's the sugar around the polio vaccine.' Then again, if you're about to risk pounds 250,000 advertising a record on television, you might require the comfort of some figures to back you up.

The key distinction is between quantitative and qualitative research. Quantitative research compiles numerical evidence on the basis of straight answers to straight questions. (Do you think Kylie's sexy: yes or no?) Qualitative research gets in closer by commissioning people to sit down in small discussion groups and work problems through. (What exactly do you find sexy about Kylie?) And it's qualitative research the record business is increasingly inclined to squeeze its information from.

Trevor Eyles commissioned the paper on Kylie. 'There was a clear bias towards different tracks. 'Especially for You', which was a duet with Jason Donovan, didn't come out well with the teenagers, though it did with the mothers. 'Hand on your Heart' - now, that happened with the 11-14 year olds, but not the mums. But 'Je ne Sais Pourquoi' came through stronger with the younger ones, and the adults tended to lose the plot . . .'

Rounded up into some sort of coherence, these findings dictated, to a degree, the look of the sleeve, in which Kylie retains some traces of the impish pop starlet while at the same time contriving to look mildly like a young mum herself. The thought occurs, if record companies could extend this approach to new acts, they could somehow formularise pop in its entirety. But even in its current form, restrained to greatest hits campaigns and career re-thinks, musical market research is an alarming presence. On a street near your own, eight complete strangers could, even now, be gathered in somebody's front room, talking openly about the Shadows.

The Shadows go in for a lot of pre-release research. As an act which now pretty well exclusively turns out instrumental versions of other people's hits, they are in a unique position to exploit qualitative information. While their next album is still but a twinkle in the studio engineer's eye, market researchers are out with a long list of potential titles, canvassing opinions on what songs Shadows fans would like to hear the Shadows play. And while they're about it, they'll collect information on what sort of sleeve the fans would like to see wrapped around the record they would like to hear. This is giving the punters what they want, writ large.

'Hank Marvin's red guitar. People tend to identify very strongly with that as an image. And obviously Hank's glasses come up.' This is Jan Trill speaking. Trill has, on several occasions now, got people together with a view to batting around ideas about the Shadows. She runs a marketing research company in Ruislip and would like to be able to give you a comprehensive list of the pop stars she has worked for, but the record companies forbid her to, mostly for fear that the artists may not like having this fact about themselves aired. Presumably it could occasion queasy embarrassment, rather as if it was leaked that, at one point in your life, you had indulged in some minor cosmetic surgery. But Trill can at least reveal that she just completed a project for Polydor, involving 'focus groups' (as they are known in America) and assembling statistics to shape the marketing campaign for their forthcoming Abba compilation.

Her tactics are as follows. The group meets in a volunteer's home. If possible, nobody knows when they turn up exactly which artist they're going to be talking about; 'that's to stop people preparing too many views in advance'. Everyone gets a glass of wine to help them relax. Groups are either all female or all male, never mixed; 'because if you're going to get onto the matter of a pop star's sex appeal, you don't want people to feel inhibited'. The conversation opens with a general chat about musical tastes and then narrows in.

Trill will try and sustain the talk for as long as possible before she whips out any visual material, 'just to get a sense of how they perceive the artist when they're not directly confronted by them'. Then she might show the group a prospective track-listing, perhaps a video, ask them about advertisement ideas, reveal some possible sleeve artworks ('three or four different concepts in one session'). Trill is now adept at handling what is known in market research as 'the dominant respondent', or what is known outside as 'the loudmouth'. The tactic is to keep asking 'what does everyone else feel about this' until he or she gets the point and shuts up.

Then she reports back to George McManus at Polydor records. McManus is widely revered in the business for pulling off a couple of sensational marketing coups; he was behind last year's platinum-selling Neil Sedaka compilation, released when the artist's popularity rating was thought to have dropped off the bottom of the scale; and he designed a Vangelis retrospective, which came absolutely out of nowhere, 'the sleeve, the advertisement, all of it pre-researched'.

McManus had an idea it might be time to reappraise some of Abba's neglected album tracks and was especially keen to spice up the tracklist with that frequently over-looked sing-along number, 'Like Old Friends Do'. The focus groups gave that notion the big thumbs down. They wanted the Abba they knew, straight up, undiluted by any record company executive's fond crushes. 'You need that immediacy, that public comeback. You can lose your perspective on a project, sat in an office on your own.'

The reverse is true, also. Perhaps the best thing you could say for the incursion of market research into pop is it presents a rare chance for the public to tamper with the workings of a record company. If you are asked to contribute to one of these focus group sessions, it could be the only chance you will ever get to personally veto a Greatest Hits of Sky compilation.

(Photograph omitted)