ACCORDING TO Louis Walsh, we're living in a Tin Pan Alley-style golden age where classic pop songs are endlessly conveyor-belted out to the masses. I'm sure the Bay City Rollers' manager, Tam Paton, thought exactly the same 25 years ago but, hey, when was the last time you heard 'Shang-A-Lang' on the radio?

Louis can spout whatever rhetoric he wants, but the fact of the matter is that since releasing Where We Belong last month, Boyzone have been out-performed in the UK album chart by such arch-rockists as The Verve, Smashing Pumpkins, Embrace and, ahem, Rod Stewart who's been doing almost twice as much business as them with When We Were The New Boys.

As any A&R person worth their yearly bonus will tell you, there's bugger all money to be made from singles - something which Dannii Minogue will be painfully aware of having just been dropped by BMG after notching up four top 20 "hits" in a row.

"They're not product, they're marketing tools," is the verdict of one UK retail source. "The way it works with most the majors is that for every single you buy at the dealer price of £2.50, they'll give you an additional one or two copies free. I've even been offered five-for-the-price-of-one deals which means a record can sell 100,00 copies over the counter and bring in just £50,000. Bearing in mind the cost of advertising, promotion and the per-unit mechanical royalty that gets paid to artists, that means a number one single can actually end up costing the record company money."

Despite Epic UK's reluctance to discuss how they've been marketed, there's every reason to believe that B*Witched were helped to the top spot in this way with first-week buyers able to snap up 'C'est La Vie' for as little as 99p. Sound commercial sense if they manage to shift a comparable number of albums, but bad news if they go the same way as OTT whose This One's For You collection was almost instantly bargain-binned. Unlike Ash, Therapy?, The Divine Comedy, U2, The Cranberries, The Saw Doctors and those other deceased Irish rock stars who are all au fait with life in the top 20.

Actually, with Louis so obviously hung-up on sales figures, the market we ought to be analysing is America where one of the big earners this year is the Dave Matthews Band - a bunch so conservatively rock 'n' roll they make Hanson look like Mansun.

Similarly, I can't remember Slayer ever covering an Osmonds song but, there they are, the second highest new entry of the week in the US charts, behind John Fogerty who hasn't exactly been over-burdened with Smash Hits coverage himself. It's the same story live with Matthews, Clapton, Dylan, Aerosmith and Sarah McLachlan being 1998's hottest tickets.

He's a nice bloke, great fun and gives good copy, but Louis Walsh is also something of a musical fascist whose definition of pop isn't so much narrow as tunnel-visioned on the acts - or the kind of acts - he has in his managerial stable. E.G. The Carter Twins and Who's Eddie who, with their diuretic stream of dodgy covers and shameless photo-ops, are every bit as sad as the rock has-beens propping up the bar at Lillie's. Speaking of which, it's rather amusing how Louis equates the demise of Def Leppard with the end of rock music as we know it. A 20-year-old poodle-perm band from Sheffield running their course is an entirely different proposition from the whole genre withering away irreversibly.

Ronan Keating has proved himself to be a competent songwriter but, shorn of Boyzone's collective identity and their less than discerning adolescent audience, who's to say he won't be on the casting couch for the next revival of Grease? A touch harsh, perhaps, because Ronan really can sing, but let's remember that Boyzone haven't sold that many more records than Bros.

It's also telling that, having started life as a boy bander, Robbie Williams has been risking life, limb and liver recently to establish his rock 'n' roll credentials.

Louis is spot on, though, when he refers to the staleness of the Dublin rock scene. Your Junksters and Junipers are mere also-rans in the star quality stakes compared to Kerri-Ann, and while great art may be beyond their grasp, I'll take In Utopia over The Frames any day.

In other words, there's good, bad and indifferent in all genres with pop capable of being just as exhilarating - and duff - as rock.

Not so much 'C'est La Vie' as 'Vive La Difference!' n