Why artists are releasing "mood EPs" to game Spotify's algorithm
Guide by Eli Enis
As I wrote last fall, the EP is going through an existential crisis. Artists are increasingly choosing to call their short-form releases “projects” in order to avoid the stigmas of the word “EP”, which can dissuade journalists from covering the project and implies to fans that it’s an incomplete artistic idea. Technologically, because Spotify defines an album as any release that’s at least seven songs long, artists are intentionally dropping seven-track projects in order to reap the perceived benefits of Spotify’s UX prioritization of albums over EPs.
But there’s one way that labels are still taking advantage of the EP in its most skeletal form — and solely for the purpose of exploiting fickle playlisting algorithms.
Throughout 2020, artists like Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Lil Wayne, and others have begun releasing projects that some industry insiders are calling “mood EPs.” These projects aren’t actually “new” releases, because there usually isn’t any new music on them. Rather, they simply rearrange previously released tracks into mood-themed compilations, for the purpose of gaming Spotify’s algorithm and extending the life cycle of a given album.
Mood-based or thematic EPs aren’t promoted like traditional EPs — if they’re even promoted at all. Instead, they’re quietly uploaded to streaming services and given titles like Party(Justin Bieber), ~Driving Vibes~(Lauv) and Weezy Flow(Lil Wayne) that read and look more like fan-made mood and activity playlists or compilations than like intentional presentations of new artistic material (in fact, many of these EPs are categorized as compilations on Apple Music).
Justin Bieber was the canary in the coalmine for this trend. On March 24, 2020, he released an EP titled R&Bieber that featured five already-released songs from his recent album Changes. Considering that Bieber was adamant about Changes being labeled an R&B album at the upcoming Grammys, releasing a project with that title seems like his not-so-subtle way of reinforcing that genre tag.
Two days later, though, Bieber released another EP titled Work From Home, which included four songs from Changes and an acoustic version of his single “Intentions.” This seemed like a direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the time, where countries around the world entered into lockdown mode and major DSPs were pivoting to marketing strategies that focused on at-home rather than on-the-go lifestyles.
[Pictured above: Justin Bieber’s “mood EP’s” from early 2020]
Throughout the next few weeks, Bieber would release four more mood EPs — Biebs and Chill, Hailey’s Favs,Couple Goalsand Party— that are comprised entirely of songs from Changes, but have little to no visual or titular association with the record. Notably, these EPs all share the same art design and similarly innocuous, SEO-esque titles as the mood-based playlists that are also featured on Bieber’s Spotify profile (“Dance with Justin Bieber”, “Chill with Justin Bieber”, “Major Feels with Justin Bieber”, etc.).
So if these mood EPs are being fashioned as playlists — and essentially function as playlists to the end listener — then why are they being uploaded as EPs, with the false implication that they’re standalone artistic statements full of new material?
According to the experts I spoke with, landing in Spotify’s Release Radar playlists — which automatically deliver users new releases from artists they follow on the platform — is the primary motive. While most of these mood EPs are also available on competing DSPs like Apple Music and Amazon Music, Spotify’s stronger emphasis on algorithmic playlisting and recommendation makes the Swedish service a natural focal point for this kind of strategy.
“I think a lot of labels are experimenting with ways to get on Release Radar … for songs that need an extra boost — or that are already performing well,” says Flighthouse account manager Brendan Kennedy. “It’s more of a marketing strategy for performing on Spotify, rather than pushing to fans.”
[Pictured: Jeremy Zucker, photo courtesy of Republic Records]
Before he took his new position at Flighthouse in late 2020, Kennedy was the Head of Digital at the artist management company Visionary Music Group — home to UMG-signed pop artist Jeremy Zucker, who also released a string of mood EPs last summer, including ( love, ), ( stars, ), ( & ) and ( reasons we don’t keep in touch ) (more on this series later).
While working on Zucker’s team during that rollout, Kennedy saw that the intention behind the strategy was to retrigger Spotify’s playlist-pitching mechanism and get those songs back onto high-traffic, algorithmically-curated playlists normally reserved for “new music.” Re-releasing songs in different formats can also help labels carry out market research and run tests on possible singles.
“If you don’t have a single, then having this push helps you identify a focus track that’s working as you get more data,” says Kennedy. “I feel like there are some songs that just get lost in the album rollout that aren’t necessarily focus tracks, that don’t get playlisted for whatever reason, but become a fan favorite.”
In that sense, these EPs are intended to be self-fulfilling marketing pushes: Not only do they give fans the chance to discover a new favorite deep cut, but by re-delivering the songs to Spotify, those deep cuts are also then blasted into Release Radar playlists, where they rack up even more streams and send fans searching for more.
The three kinds of mood EPs
Bieber and Zucker are just two of several other artists — most of whom are signed to UMG or one of its subsidiaries — who have experimented with the mood EP format. While the overarching goal for all of these EPs is to game Spotify’s release system and cash in on playlist streams, I’ve also identified a few different subcategories of the mood EP, each of which serves a slightly different purpose depending on the tracks involved.
Mood EP #1: Rearranging new releases to keep up momentum
The first category consists of mood EPs that repackage songs from a single, existing album into EP form and are, either in title and/or in cover art, aesthetically tied to that very album.
Perhaps the most prominent example of this iteration is Taylor Swift’s series of “chapters” for her 2020 album folklore (pictured above). Each chapter is a collection of six songs taken from the original album and rearranged to focus on specific emotional themes. folklore: the escapism chapter features songs like “The Lakes” and “Mirrorball” that conjure a specific scene or setting through an almost dream-like lens. Meanwhile, folklore: the sleepless nights chapterand folklore: the yeah i showed up at your party chapter have names that feel more like casual working titles devised by Swift’s obsessed fans.
The artwork for these “chapters” looks like repurposed press photos, and the text on them resembles a font someone would slap on an Instagram story (in fact, the layout of these EPs on Swift’s Spotify page above bears stark resemblance to her Instagram profile). They feel more artfully considered than the tackier mood EPs from the likes of Justin Bieber, but still one step removed from how Swift would normally present an EP of brand-new material.
Ever the marketing savant, though, Swift ingeniously introduced these EPs as her way of recontextualizing the album her fans had just spent the previous month voraciously consuming and decoding. ”In my head, the songs on folklore fit together in different groups and ‘chapters’ – based on how they fit together thematically,” she tweeted on August 21, when the first ”chapter” went live.
Her clever framing of the EPs as a creative reshuffling has a veneer of authenticity, but their existence serves a much more utilitarian function. In essence, these EPs gave her a second chance to deliver the record to fans, the opportunity to tell a different story with the same songs and, chiefly, the ability to reload all of those tracks into the Spotify algorithm so that they once again populated the Release Radar playlists for her 35 million followers.
“Re-deliveries of songs in new products still hit listeners’ Release Radars, which, for an artist with Taylor Swift levels of popularity, is a big streaming boost,” says Matt Brinkworth, a digital strategist and Head of Digital at Captured Tracks/Omnian Music Group. He believes that this move is strategically similar to both deluxe albums (another way to re-trigger Release Radar) and the concept of waterfalling singles, which is the act of including the previously released single under the latest single in a given cycle, thus encouraging listeners to stream both consecutively. “Each new single product facilitates more streams for past singles,” Brinkworth says. “That’s the point of the strategy.”
Mood EP #2: Reviving and recontextualizing back catalog (whether or not it makes sense)
The aforementioned Bieber and Swift mood EPs were slightly different ways of reintroducing their latest albums to fans, but not all mood EPs are being used to promote just one single album. There are also EPs in this manner that contain an array of songs from throughout the artist’s catalog that are lumped together based on a specific style or mood.
YG’s 4 The PeoplethematicEP, which dropped the same week as Swift’sfirst folklore chapter, is a prime example of this approach. The release features six songs from four different YG albums that all deal with socio-political subject matter, hence the populist project title. That same month, the rapper also released EPs of preexisting material called 4 The Ladies, Do It 4 Bompton, and 4 The Fans— each dedicated to their stated themes, but all loosely tied together by the same cover art design.
Similarly, throughout the summer of 2020, Lauv and AWAL released a series of thematic EPs that had similar, rainbow-colored cover art designs (pictured below), and each tied together existing releases from the artist’s catalog based on specific activities such as working out, partying and driving, as well as emotions such as loneliness.
“With any artist you become a fan of, there’s a lot of music [from them] that you might not know,” Max Gredinger, EVP and artist manager at Foundations Music, where he manages Lauv and mxmtoon, shared during a recent Water & Music hangout. “We figured we would curate these ‘mood EPs’ … to drive attention to either lesser-known tracks or older tracks, so newer fans of Lauv would be able to learn more about his back catalog and go further into that world.”
Other times, though, the theme isn’t even that clear. In October 2020, Lil Wayne uploaded a “new” EP called Thief In The Night(with atrocious cover art), which featured a random mix of six of his existing songs from the previous 12 years. The next day, he released another EP titled What’s A Goon To A Goblin?(an iconic lyric of his) that’s actually categorized as an Album on Spotify because it’s seven songs long, but is merely a compilation of scattered Wayne cuts from the last two decades.
Mood Ep #3: Why not both?
Lastly, there are a good number of mood EPs that blend the previous two categories: They mostly feature material from the artist’s latest album and are aesthetically complementary to that album, but they also contain a random single or two from another portion of the artist’s discography.
For instance, Halsey broke down her 2020 album, Manic, into a series of themed EPs. With titles like Manic: Revengeand Manic: Confessional, they’re clearly meant to serve as companions to Manic the album — but Revenge also weirdly features the song “Hold Me Down” from Halsey’s 2015 debut Badlands. Similarly, her Manic: …Or Are You NormalEP is all Manic tracks except for its closer, which is her gold-certified 2017 hit, “Sorry.”
[Pictured: Halsey’s 2020 ‘Manic: Revenge EP’ that includes her 2015 song “Hold Me Down”]
Jeremy Zucker pulled a similar move with his mood EP series (referenced earlier in this article). After releasing his debut album love is not dying in April 2020, he released four EPs in July that were presented to fans with a Swiftian story. “i wanted to rerelease the album in a format closer to the way it was originally conceived, under its original title: ‘love, stars, & reasons we don’t keep in touch’,” Zucker wrote in a conversational Twitter thread. However, even though he introduced them as a reimagining of his new album, the entirety of the ( & ) EP and two of the five songs on ( reasons we don’t keep in touch ) are actually old tracks that predate the album he claims to be reintroducing.
Therefore, the whole maneuver serves as a convenient (and contrived) way of stuffing a “new” release with years-old singles, under the guise that it’s somehow part of the same artistic statement as the album its stripping parts from. Within this strategy, the EP isn’t a structured release format; it’s a sandbox where labels can mold a musical package out of recycled parts and send it through the algorithm to rack up streams on the same songs, again and again.
That said, Brinkworth has a slightly less dystopian way of looking at these projects: As alternate ways for fans with short attention spans to get through an album’s worth of material. “We always see streaming numbers trail off towards the end of albums,” he says. “Shuffling the order will bring other tracks to the top of tracklists, highlight underloved tracks and increase any algorithmic curation potential of those songs by providing them with more streams.”
Brinkworth also claims that there can be a more creative justification to openly experimenting with reshuffling tracks: “What comes before and after a song is as important in the listening experience as the song itself and can affect how a song feels,” he says. “A silent pause after a song will give a different feeling than immediately dropping into the next track. So, as much as it feels very mechanism manipulating and like a strategy-based decision, there’s still an artistic element. Keeping the listening experience fresh.”
[Pictured: Taylor Swift promoting one of her EP’s as an “album theme”]
Conclusion: A strategy that is evolving in real time
Although there’s clearly a lot of legitimate strategy behind this trend, it’s still in beta mode, with label teams simply throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.
There’s the issue of what to even call these kinds of releases. After initially introducing her folklore EP’s as “chapters,” Swift later deviated from that word and used terms like “thematic composition” and “album theme” instead to promote them on Twitter. There’s also the question of to what extent the artists themselves are actually getting involved in the strategy. While the likes of Swift and Zucker were clearly involved in framing the narrative around their own mood EPs to fans, this isn’t always the case.
For instance, Halsey’s label UMG released an EP last summer titled Collabs, featuring an assortment of collaborative tracks from throughout Halsey’s career. The artist had a hilariously tepid response to the release on Twitter: “just something the label did so all those songs are in one place! like a playlist! idk man haha I was like ‘oh word cool!’”
Such a reaction suggests that these EPs are likely not artist-driven, and shows how forced they can feel when they’re not presented with a more creative and intentional story. It’s also unclear whether mood EP releases actually lead to a significant streaming bump for the artist.
Nonetheless, Kennedy expects to see more artists and labels adopt the strategy in 2021. “This is just another small, backpocket strategy that you can implement to help boost [songs] slightly,” he says. “People are thinking of ways to reinvent the album and still keep it new and fresh because there’s so much listening volume now. There’s so much music that when you drop an album, maintaining relevance is way harder than it was even ten years ago.”
Brinkworth has yet to see this trend spill into the indie sphere where he operates. But in an industry without live music and where streaming is the dominant driver of revenue, he thinks a strategy like this makes perfect sense to help keep an album in people’s ears.
“The bottom line is we currently don’t have touring as an option to keep driving attention to the music,” Brinkworth says. “So everyone is looking for creative ways to keep the songs at the forefront of attention and prolong their half-life.” Instead of touring physical venues, these artists and their teams are opting to tour our emotions.
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Eli Enis is a journalist based out of Pittsburgh, PA who mostly writes about music and internet culture. His work can be found in Billboard, Entertainment Weekly, Vice and many other publications. You can find selections of his writing here, follow his unvarnished thoughts on Twitter and get in contact with him via elijenis1994@gmail.com. He previously wrote for Water & Music about how artists are shifting from albums and EPs to more nebulous, seven-song “projects.”
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