PAY DAY: The term pay-per-view ...

PAY DAY: The term pay-per-view has become almost synonymous with blockbuster in television events: the Rolling Stones . . . Wrestlemania . . . New Kids on the Block . . . Fishbone.

Fishbone?

The Los Angeles-based funk-rock band has developed a cult following, but hardly the kind of audience normally associated with a pay-per-view concert. Yet the group’s performance on Thursday at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco will go out live as a national pay-per-view, at $19.95 a pop.

It’s part of a new trend in which the blockbusters are being complemented by what are called “niche” events--programs that appeal to a small but loyal audience.

“Pay-per-view is tailor-made for two types of events,” says Bruce Karpas, president of New York-based Reiss Media, which is the distributor of the Fishbone concert. “There are the huge, mass-appeal events where revenue is so huge that other media can’t compete, or the niche events where the audience isn’t large enough for other media.”

The niche approach is the emphasis of the new “Thursday Night Concerts” pay-per-view series produced by Bob Meyrowitz, who pioneered radio concert broadcasts with the “King Biscuit Flower Hour” 20 years ago. The televised concerts are generally sent out live, and then repeated over the following two weeks. The series has featured such acts as the Cure, the Neville Brothers and Dwight Yoakam, and next up after Fishbone is a rap package of Naughty by Nature, Digital Underground and Queen Latifah.

The key is that the costs of the niche events are relatively low. The artists don’t demand the high guaranteed fees that a superstar would, and production of the event is not as expensive. So even if only 90,000 subscribers take the telecast--just .5% of the nation’s 18 million pay-per-view equipped cable homes--that still means a potential gross of nearly $1.8 million.

By contrast, the Judds’ recent farewell concert drew an estimated 250,000 subscribers at $24.95 each, which translates into a gross of more than $6 million. That made it the biggest-selling pay-per-view pop concert ever--over the Rolling Stones and New Kids on the Block.