So like it or not, Modern Rock, like Top 40 before it, has become a boom-or-bust singles-driven format. Several major-label A&R folks were happy to name -- off the record, of course -- bands whom they felt had released the "wrong" single. One agreed that though it was a good album, Belly's King indeed lacked a strong "hit." Another stressed that Jennifer Trynin's mistake was not releasing "One Year Down" as the first single from Cockamamie. (Trynin admits that her label wanted to make "One Year Down" her next single and she argued against it. Warner Bros. is releasing "One Year Down" to radio this month.)

However you choose to trace the lineage of today's alternative rock, you're probably not going to find a strong tradition of hit singles. There's a good reason for that, a practical one even: 10 years ago the main outlet for underground bands was college radio, a non-commercial format that simply wasn't as driven by singles. Many would also argue that the catchiest songs aren't necessarily the best ones.

"You have to understand," explains Jim Barber, the Geffen/DGC A&R talent scout who signed Lisa Loeb and Girls Against Boys, "in a lot of markets these new alternative stations are being run by people who used to work at Top 40. There are records, like Pink Flag by Wire, that I would rather die than give up listening to. But those records are pretty much irrelevant to the people who are running these alternative stations. There are still a handful of these stations that have been around for a while and that are programmed by people who have a context for this music. But a lot of these stations just switched over to the format in the last year or two. I mean, three years ago there were 35 alternative stations, and now there are over 100. If you add that many stations that quickly, then there aren't going to be enough programmers around who approach things the way the format was conceived. It's like in baseball: there's not enough good pitching today because of the new expansion teams."

Regardless of the quality of their pitching, these Modern Rock stations are a major player in the new world order. The list of post-Nirvana artists who have been broken by the influential alternative stations -- KROQ in LA, WNNX in Atlanta, KNDD in Seattle, WHFX in DC, WKQX in Chicago, and WFNX in Boston* -- is impressive: Offspring, Bush, Veruca Salt, Letters to Cleo, the Presidents of the United States of America, Silverchair, Goo-Goo Dolls, Dave Matthews, Beck. It might just sound like a big bowl of alphabet soup, but in each case, one radio's playlist caught the eyes of MTV and the rest of the Modern Rock world and pushed an obscure band into heavy national rotation with alarming efficiency.

It's said that power breeds corruption, and so there are plenty of radio-related war stories circulating out there among bands. Juliana Hatfield tells of one radio station that wanted her to play a benefit. She was on the other side of the country on tour and, as she explains, "It didn't seem practical to play the show. So I said no and the station said they would stop playing my single if I didn't play the show. So I didn't play and they stopped playing my record."

Kay Hanley, Letters to Cleo's plucky frontwoman, is a bit more blunt on the subject: "Let's talk about radio festivals, which is basically payola. You usually don't get paid for the shows, but the payoff is that your song gets added to that station. If you don't play, then your song doesn't get added. We had an experience where we were offered $10,000 to play a benefit of some kind in July. We didn't know that there was a radio station behind the show. Then `Awake' was released as the first single from our new album, and this station that had played the hell out of `Hear & Now' decides they're not going to play it. We asked them why and they told us that they're not going to play anything we release ever again because we played a show sponsored by the other radio station in that area."

Sour grapes? Probably not. But even if you're of the opinion that all's fair in love and radio, there are other factors to consider. The invisible hand of computer technology has already had a significant impact on the music industry through SoundScan, a service that accurately keeps track of units sold in major record stores. In the old days, retail outlets reported their own numbers in a notoriously corrupt system that ensured certain releases would rank high in the charts. And since a lot of consumers tend to buy what's hot, those often-inflated reports would yield real sales. Computers are also now being used by the big radio stations to tally more accurately audience response to particular songs, and for what's being termed "call-out" research. The latter consists of telephone surveys where sample groups are asked to rate songs on the basis of a 10- or 20-second soundbite.

"You could not do that kind of massive, cross-market, call-out research 10 years ago," comments Fort Apache's Smith. "That's a computer-age development. Stations like KROQ do that kind of demographic research, and a lot of other stations follow their playlist, so radio can basically push what the people want. And it turns out that the average American consumer wants more Joan Osborne and less PJ Harvey. T hat's a little scary. Imagine if the great painters and novelists of history had been silenced because the people wanted more Danielle Steel."

In fact, many of the greatest artists in history were ignored in their lifetimes. Van Gogh comes to mind, and Ulysses wasn't exactly a best seller. And 10 years ago bands like the Replacements and Hüsker Dü certainly didn't get much mainstream airplay. Hell, go back another two decades and you'll find the latest inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Velvet Underground, playing hole-in-the-wall clubs in Cleveland. Maybe the alternative boom of the early '90s was merely one of those occasional aberrations and the industry is simply in the process of settling into its old ways. Maybe the next step is for us to lower our commercial expectations for alternative artists and start paying more attention to their artistic accomplishments.

Some of today's alternative artists aren't alarmed at the prospect of losing a mainstream audience. Juliana Hatfield says, "I got a little taste of having a lot of people like my music and it sort of made me feel that I don't want the largest number of people as possible to listen to my music. I don't want everybody to like it. I want people who understand it to like it. I want a quality audience because I think I make quality music."

Tanya Donelly agrees that perhaps the present environment isn't all that bad. "It seems to me that people should be concentrating on the fact that there are more bands making a living at it now, though maybe fewer of us are hugely successful. There's an opportunity for more bands to have modest success."

Speaking on behalf of Buffalo Tom, a band who've built a solid base of modest success, is manager Tom Johnston: "Somebody recently said to me, `Buffalo Tom are always within throwing distance of the mainstream, one of these times they'll get lucky.' Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but I think we've realized that we can't will it to happen. But it's not like we sit around bemoaning the fact that they're not selling as many records as the Cranberries."

On the down side -- and this is also nothing new in the record industry -- it's clear that radio and labels can't support the volume of alternative acts being signed. Something's gotta give. Which means you'll likely see a lot of bands getting released from their contracts in the next year. Janet Billig, a young player in the industry who's done everything from managing Nirvana to working as a VP at Atlantic and now has her own management company, is candid but not overly pessimistic about prospects: "We're going to see a lot of bands dropped, but there are going to be places for them to go in terms of indie labels. It's all cyclical. You know, maybe Nirvana broke the door down for alternative the same way Yes broke the door down for prog rock."

"A lot of these bands that came out of the underground in the past few years will probably feel that signing to a major label wasn't the best thing for their careers," admits Geffen's Barber. "And they'll probably be right. But think of it this way: a lot of the class of '79 Boston bands that got signed to major labels -- the Nervous Eaters and the Neighborhoods -- didn't even get to make records that sounded like themselves. At least a band like the Dambuilders are getting to make records that sound like the Dambuilders."

Ultimately, the success of alternative rock may indeed be its downfall as computers, some radio stations, some major labels, and a glut of new bands all unwittingly conspire to create a format where the lowest common denominator, the latest Pearl Jam sound-alike, or a former Canadian dance diva can dominate the charts. But something tells me that the underground from which alternative rock emerged is here to stay. Whether things are getting better or worse for alternative music clearly depends on one's perspective. Still, there's no denying that Modern Rock has once again changed the look, sound, feel, and the economics of the mainstream music and the way we experience it.

Consider this from Kay Hanley: "I remember when Morphine released their first record on their own and someone told me they had sold 1000 copies. I was just in awe. It was unfathomable to me that a band that I was going out to see all the time could sell that many records on their own. And now I think it sucks that we only sold 60,000 records. There's a change for you."

*WFNX is part of the Phoenix Media Communications Group, which also publishes this newspaper. The Gavin Report has named 'FNX the nation's best alternative-rock station four out of the last five years.