Soundtracks Play Key Role in Sales Pitch : Movies: ‘Gladiator’ opens with an offer of free copies to moviegoers; ‘White Men Can’t Jump’ will have two albums for disparate audiences.

How’s this for a show-biz marketing riddle: How will Columbia Records get paid for 100,000 to 300,000 copies of its new “Gladiator” soundtrack without selling a single one?

The answer says a lot about Hollywood’s increasingly high-stakes marketing climate. In an experiment designed to boost its opening weekend blitz for “Gladiator,” a new street-boxing drama, Columbia Pictures is giving away free copies of the soundtrack to fans who see the film today, its first day in theaters.

In one of the marvels of corporate synergy, Columbia’s motion picture wing will compensate its record division for the giveaways.

Columbia Pictures Chairman Mark Canton says it’s part of the studio’s strategy to create a “big-event” atmosphere for each new release. “With all of our films, we’ve been trying to identify what makes them stand out,” Canton said. “For a movie like ‘Gladiator,’ the soundtrack is a key marketing tool.”

The album includes new music by P.M. Dawn, Warrant, Clivilles & Cole and 3rd Bass.

“When your core audience is a pop or urban audience, the stars of the soundtrack album are just as important as the stars of the movie,” Canton said. “We did some research and discovered that the film’s fans would be very excited to get the soundtrack when they went to see it.”

Columbia says it’s only committed to giving away soundtracks “while the supply lasts” to moviegoers who will receive postcards at the box office which they can mail to order a free cassette. But with “Gladiator” opening in 1,300 theaters today, the offer could be redeemed by a huge number of fans. If Columbia gave away 250,000 cassettes, it could end up paying Columbia Records, its Sony sister company, about $1 million.

Canton insists the giveaway isn’t simply aimed at wooing moviegoers away from “Wayne’s World,” the current box-office champ, which has been attracting a similar youth-oriented audience. “We’re not trying to knock them off,” he said. “We just want to open our movie strongly enough so that we can build an audience and go the distance.”

“Gladiator” isn’t the only film with a groundbreaking soundtrack marketing strategy. Sensing that 20th Century Fox’s upcoming playground basketball drama, “White Men Can’t Jump,” may appeal to a variety of audiences, EMI Records is releasing two soundtracks simultaneously.

One soundtrack, “White Men Can’t Jump,” is largely filled with mainstream black pop artists, including Jody Watley, Aretha Franklin and Boys II Men. The other soundtrack, “White Men Can’t Rap,” is a six-song EP featuring more hard-core rap acts like Cypress Hill and Gang Starr.

“The movie works on so many different levels--as a black movie, a white movie and a buddy picture--that we decided to go with two different types of records,” said EMI Records A&R; executive Ron Fair.

Fox’s marketing team came up with a few imaginative wrinkles of its own. It kicked off its “White Men” nationwide ad campaign by running a TV commercial at halftime of the much-ballyhooed Feb. 16 Lakers-Celtics game, minutes before Magic Johnson’s jersey was retired. And at other Lakers games recently, the studio showed the movie’s theatrical trailer on the Forum’s scoreboard video screen immediately after the halftime buzzer.

Has the marketing campaign, which includes thousands of street posters and bus billboards, paid off? “For four months, we’d been trying to get one very big-name group to do a song for the soundtrack and nothing ever showed up,” said the film’s director, Ron Shelton. “But as soon as the ads hit the streets--surprise--we suddenly got a song from them. They’d realized there was all this buzz around the movie and they wanted to be part of it. If the kids out there react the same way, we could have a lot of people coming to see the movie.”