Short answers, pulled from the story.
Seymour Stein launched a campaign in October 1977 to replace the word punk with new wave. He was the founder of Sire Records and believed that calling bands punk would result in poor sales for his artists.
Music historian Simon Reynolds described new wave music as having a twitchy, agitated feel. Musicians often played choppy rhythm guitars with angular riffs and fast tempos while keyboards and stop-start song structures were common features of the genre.
MTV launched in 1981 and heavily promoted new-wave acts in the United States. In December 1982, a Gallup poll showed 14% of teenagers rated new wave as their favorite type of music and it was the third-most-popular genre at that time.
Regional new wave scenes developed across Europe including the Netherlands and Germany where Neue Deutsche Welle emerged. Poland and Belgium contributed coldwave movements alongside Yugoslav new wave while Soviet post-punk and new wave influenced acts gained prominence primarily in Moscow and Leningrad.
By 1983, punk and new wave was largely dead and buried as a commercial force because music industry consultants began banning disc jockeys from using the term around 1983. Critics like Robert Christgau defined new wave as a polite term devised to reassure people scared by punk and it enjoyed only a two or three-year run before falling out of favor.