A UNIVERSAL SOLVENT is seeping through the music industry, loosening restraints and breaking rules that have governed it for two decades. The artists who get contracts today would have been laughed out of executive suites from Fifth Avenue to Burbank five years ago, but people are buying their records, and listening to them too.

Nothing here to raise the hackles of even the most paranoid Ahmet Ertegun or Robert Stigwood, except for one curious feature of this "new wave" of bands--there are hundreds of them. People have realized you don't need a 64-track mixing machine and multiple synthesizers to create a listenable song. There have always been garage bands, and 90 per cent of them never made it to the driveway, but today the garages are sending skilled graduates into cities all the way from New York and Boston on down to Akron.

Meanwhile things are hotting up in the West End all right

Contracts in the offices an groups in the night

My bummin slummin friends have all got new boots

An someone just asked me if the group would wear suits

There's 22 singers but one microphone Back in the garage

There's five guitar players but one guitar Back in the garage

In America, the passions aren't as overtly political, not yet anyway. But the musical conditions are the same--an explosion of bands that can play good, loud, fast rock and roll in towns that have probably never heard it before. Bands that you can hear just by walking into a local club on any night; bands that you don't have to buy tickets for months in advance; bands that have only a guitar, a bass, and a drummer, and couldn't care less that they don't have a French horn. And more bands than any record label could possibly sign, produce or promote.

Which poses a nightmare for the people whose job that's always been. Audiences are going to want to hear local artists whether they get recording contracts or not. Record companies don't have the time or the discernment to choose among the groups; their efforts to date have been haphazard at best.

We may soon see a very different set-up for the moribund popular music field: thriving local musical cultures with their own regional audiences, their own small showcases, and their own independent record labels entirely supplanting the super-group, platinum record, Meadowlands Stadium pattern of the last decade. That would mean the multi-million-dollar structure of big record labels--usually the corporate subsidiaries of even larger entertainment conglomerates--could atrophy or entirely crumble.

For now, of course, the "new wave" has given sagging record sales a shot in the arm (that's an appropriate phrase for the spiritual descendants of the Velvet Underground, anyway), and the odd-named bands are crowding into executive suites trying to get that national contract. But in a few years, sooner perhaps than you think, it may become necessary for recording industry brass to take some decisive action. Something like this:

THE SCENE: A red-velvet conference room in Rockefeller Center. The chairs are nice. Recording executives have gathered from all over the country. They drink sambuca. Three coffee beans. They like the chairs. One speaks.

"Three years of this and still no light at the end of the tunnel. The bands multiply like poor people and we just can't deal with it. We sure as hell can't sign them all, and who can tell them apart anyway--they're peas in a pod. Total industry sales are down for the first time in ages.

"We thought we had given so-called 'punk rock' a bad enough name--what with the chains, the leather and Sid Vicious' 'suicide'--but then the critics turned around and called it 'new wave.' We thought disco would bring home the bacon, but what has John Travolta done for us lately? We thought the days of the early 1970s would go on forever, the time when we could deal with a few big names like Elton John, Wings, Lead Dirigible, whoever. But we didn't have it wired.