Business Notes Entertainment

Those pastel police from TV's Miami Vice never leave the station house without some trendy disco music. Now millions of their fans are hopping to the same cop pop. An album of songs culled from the program has made a high-speed chase up the record charts, selling more than 3 million copies in a month. Last week the record reached No. 1 on the Billboard magazine chart, propelled by two Top Ten singles, the instrumental Miami Vice Theme by Jan Hammer and You Belong to the City by Glenn Frey. While movie sound tracks like last summer's Beverly Hills Cop have become a proven music-industry formula, Miami Vice is the first No. 1 TV album since the Peter Gunn sound track in 1959.

The album is a financial smash for its label, MCA Records, which produced the record for just $200,000, compared with $750,000 for a typical movie sound track. Such stars as Phil Collins and Tina Turner, who contributed songs, accepted lower-than-usual fees in order to meet the budget. The record's success has inspired MCA Records to consider a sequel. Meanwhile, fans of the palmy program will not run out of music. The show's stars, Philip Michael Thomas and Don Johnson, are each working on a solo album.