Bye, albums and EPs; hello, seven-song "projects"

Within the last two years, and in 2020 in particular, artists from across genres and at every tier of the industry have increasingly released projects that are exactly seven tracks long — longer than a traditional EP, but not quite fleshed-out to be called an “album.” We’ve seen seven-song projects from Gen-Z indie stars like beabadoobee and mxmtoon; rappers of all stripes, from Future and Wiz Khalifa, to Vic Mensa and Conway The Machine; R&B up-and-comers like Ian Isiah and Savannah Cristina; and even country stars like Rascal Flatts and Chase Rice.

There might not be any creative connection between these releases, but the common thread among all of them is that they’ve been billed as non-albums (either as “EPs” or more nebulous terms like “projects”) in their press releases, and spoken about as non-albums by the artists themselves — yet ultimately categorized as “Albums” on Spotify and Apple Music.

This phenomenon poses two important questions: Why are these short releases being promoted as EPs and non-albums by the artist and their teams, but presented as albums in the place where most listeners interact with them? And even more curiously, could this contrast between the project’s promotional and functional identities be an intentional marketing strategy?

Jaclyn O’Connell, the owner and principal strategist of the digital marketing company Bittersweet Media, is the brand manager and creative director for the massively popular bedroom-pop musician Cavetown. Although the 21-year-old singer/songwriter hasn’t released a seven-song project himself, he exists in the TikTok-fueled ecosystem of mxmtoon and beabadoobee: A new generation of indie stars who are launching careers with singles, EPs and other shorter, experimental formats.

O’Connell says that the seven-song EP that winds up in the Album section is definitely a conscious trend in that ecosystem, specifically because it’s conducive to developing artists. Even though we’re living in an era when musicians can make a career out of a steady stream of singles, the greater industry still considers an artist’s debut album to be their first official statement, so there’s naturally a lot of creative pressure to deliver something lasting. Therefore, a shorter release of, say, seven songs is not only more manageable for a burgeoning artist to put together, but its digestible length isn’t intimidating to prospective fans who are constantly inundated with new material on streaming services.

“Everyone’s attention spans are so much shorter now,” O’Connell says. “So having to adapt to that and release music that way has definitely influenced how music is released now. Deciding whether or not an album should be 10 or 11 songs is definitely a conversation that I’ve had in the last year.”

Cavetown’s manager, Zack Zarrillo, believes that these seven-song projects (and shorter releases in general) have spiked in 2020 out of a necessity for artists to continue releasing music during COVID-19. Without live performance obligations, most artists have had plenty of time to write and record new songs, but Zarrillo says that without tangible goals like tours and festivals, carrying out full-fledged album campaigns right now isn’t strategically wise. “Releasing a longer EP or just singles helps you keep your monthly listeners up and keep growing to new audiences,” Zarrillo says.

Distribution technicalities: What counts as an “album,” anyway?

For decades, the two main functions of the EP have been to fill the gap between album cycles and to test the waters for a new artist. But why aren’t these recent EPs being categorized as such on Spotify and Apple Music? Why is mxmtoon’s “new EP Dawn,” as its press release states, sitting next to her “debut album The Masquerade” on Spotify? And why is seven the magic number?

In short, this comes down to how streaming companies and distributors choose to distinguish between albums and EPs.

According to the FAQ web pages by three of the leading independent distributors (CD Baby, Tunecore, and Distrokid), Spotify defines an EP as any project that has between four to six tracks and clocks in at under 30 minutes long. According to CD Baby’s website, Apple Music uses the same metrics, but they also consider any one- to three-song project with at least one track that’s 10 minutes or longer to be an EP (a likely nod to genres such as ambient, drone and doom where 12-minute songs are standard).

However, sources have told me that these style guides aren’t universal, and that projects often get miscategorized either because of holes in Spotify’s system, or because some distributors impose their own separate style guides in order to comply with the dozens of other DSPs they deliver to (each of which has their own style guides, making things even more confusing).

“You can slide a three-song EP through on Tunecore that FUGA or AudioSalad or The Orchard may make you call a single,” Zarrillo says. “There isn’t true standardization yet, but I think we’re getting there.”

Crucially, CD Baby’s website also notes how Spotify defines an album: Any project that’s either seven songs and/or at least 30 minutes in length. Therefore, no matter how you decide to label your project in a promotional setting, if it’s at least seven songs, then Spotify will automatically categorize it as an album. (There are exceptions such as Billie Eilish’s nine-song don’t smile at me EP, indicating that some labels have found a way to work around this.)

O’Connell confirms that artists’ teams are absolutely aware of that seven-song stipulation, and that getting these EPs “miscategorized” is often the goal. The reason is twofold: To cater to the user interfaces of streaming services, and to increase the likelihood of press.

Streaming UI: Albums are “the new endcaps”

On Spotify and Apple Music, an artist’s catalog is broken down into two main sections: “Albums” and “Singles and EPs,” with the former being positioned above the latter. In 2018, Trent Reznor brought attention to this UI decision when he walked back calling Nine Inch Nails’ six-song/30-minute Bad Witch an EP after initially billing it the third installment in a trilogy of EPs. “Want to know why it’s being labelled an LP instead of an EP?” Reznor posted on a NIN fan forum. “EPs show up with singles [on] Spotify and other streaming services = they get lost easier.”

This marked an instance of a prominent artist asserting that Spotify’s visual prioritization of Albums over EPs contributed directly to an EP’s streaming performance — and he’s not alone.

Zarrillo, who also co-owns Bad Timing Records and runs a distribution company called Many Hats, thoroughly believes that there are UI benefits to having your new project in the album section on Spotify as opposed to the singles and EPs section — especially for artists who have a lot of singles cluttering up that latter area. “Any additional clicks add friction to the consumer,” Zarrillo says.

Tom Mullen, a digital marketing expert with over 20 years of experience at major and independent labels, used to clean up artists’ Spotify pages when he worked in cataloging, and he agrees that EPs can easily get buried on a streaming profile. “If I’m a fan and I just got into that band, what’s going to pop up first is probably the album, and I’m going to have to scroll [to find the EP],” Mullen says. He likes to think of Spotify as the digital equivalent of the record store and the artist’s page as their “bin.”

“There used to be endcaps at the end of the aisle, and that’s where the latest record was,” describes Mullen. “Maybe this is the new endcap: You need to call [the EP] an album to be on the endcap.”

O’Connell believes that Spotify’s interface can influence whether an EP gets bumped from six to seven songs in the rollout process, but she also thinks that Spotify’s emphasis on albums is a holdover from a previous era. “I think it might be an old kind of thinking in terms of UI, because now it’s all about singles,” she says.

Press: Landing coverage without a traditional cycle

There’s a perplexing contradiction at play here: Spotify’s design is partial to albums, but their playlisting mechanic proliferates a singles-driven economy by incentivizing artists to release material at a rapid rate.

However, one sector of the industry that’s still by and large committed to the full-length album is the music press. According to one prominent publicist with experience in both the major label and indie sectors (who preferred to remain anonymous), some outlets avoid covering EPs altogether, so deciding between calling something an EP and an album can come down to how the artist’s team wants to approach press during that marketing cycle. “There are opportunities that aren’t available for EPs that are [there] for albums,” they say.

Mullen remembers being in meetings at major labels in which teams would intentionally hold back on facilitating press for an artist’s EP in order to go all-in during the next full-length album cycle. “Because when an artist has an album, they’re going to come back and say, ‘This is the big deal. I need your NYT front page. I need your music section. This EP, give me the weekly mention,’” Mullen says. “Honestly, that’s what happens.”

Trying to pique the interest of fans with minimal attention spans, navigating the music press’s disinterest in covering EPs and decoding Spotify’s prioritization of Albums over EPs creates the tension that’s central to the seven-song EP phenomenon. In theory, the twelfth-dimensional chess-tier strategy behind the seven-song project is that it’s short enough to hold a listener’s attention, long enough to be bumped to the Albums section, too short to be deemed a “debut album” by the press (thus saving that once-in-a-career opportunity for down the line when they have even more hype behind them), but also just long enough for some outlets to say, “Eh, sure,” and cover it as they would an album.

Actually achieving that final step can be the trickiest part to accomplish, and it’s led some PR teams to take the peculiar route of alternating between the words “EP” and “Album” in the same press release. For example, a recent press release for the South African indie-pop artist Manu Grace (published verbatim on Ghettoblaster Magazine) interchangeably used the terms “EP” and “album” in a way that felt like a purposefully confusing attempt at collapsing distinctions between the formats (the release was ultimately categorized as an album on Spotify). However, it’s even more common for these press releases to eschew the words “EP” and “album” altogether and opt for more vague descriptors like “collection,” “project” or “excursion.”

O’Connell is a big proponent of these alternative language choices, mainly because she doesn’t think the word “EP” works in marketing anymore. “I think that people tune it out.” O’Connell says. “I just think that EP says, ‘There is more in the works and this is just half of an idea that kind of only came to fruition’ … That’s where a lot of my feelings come from in terms of consumption, in terms of branding. Are people purposefully leaving the word ‘EP’ off because they know people aren’t paying attention when the word ‘EP’ [is there]?”

Will EPs fade from relevance?

Although it’s abundantly clear that shorter releases still hold value (arguably more than ever before), there’s a lot of evidence that suggests the EP as a format — if not merely as a format title — is on its way out. Not only are artists serving their EPs to fans as albums, reaping the potential UI benefits of a release in the albums section of a streaming service and attempting to de-emphasize the word “EP” in the press, but the ways in which artists are using the “Singles and EPs” section on Spotify is also muddying the very definition of what an EP even is.

For instance, the new standard for rolling out singles during a campaign is for artists to “waterfall” their songs together under one release. In other words, when an artist releases the second single from their album campaign, they’ll go ahead and bundle the previous single underneath it, and then continue to do so for each additional single. Therefore, if a user is perusing that artist’s Spotify page, they’ll see what might look like a four-song EP, but is actually just a short playlist of recent singles.

Another tactic that some bigger artists like Justin Bieber, YG and LAUV are doing involves building mini mood playlists in their EP section that are composed entirely of previously released singles. With generic titles like 4 The Ladies and Work From Home, these projects that are labeled as EPs are essentially truncated “greatest hits” collections that are ostensibly meant to pop up when people search those common keywords on Spotify.

Neither the waterfalled singles nor these deceptively categorized playlists are “official” EPs, but their existence begs the question: On a functional level, what’s the difference? In O’Connell’s opinion, the fading relevance of “EP” in music marketing copy is not necessarily a bad thing; it’s merely a reaction to how listeners interact with music on streaming platforms where there’s no monetary difference between the formats, and in a landscape where EPs, albums, singles, playlists and podcasts are all competing for the same attention from listeners.

“I think it’s not so much that it’s a ‘downfall’ or demise of the EP, it’s just that it’s fading,” she says. “Music cataloging and discography now reside on a spectrum . . . People just put out songs.”