Extended play

• 1. Introduction

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  In October 1957, Billboard launched a dedicated chart for a format that was neither a proper single nor a full album. The editors noted something telling about who was buying: seven of the top ten best-selling entries featured artists with what they called "powerful teen-age appeal." Four of those slots belonged to a single artist: Elvis Presley. The format was the extended play, the EP, and it occupied a peculiar middle ground that the music industry had not quite agreed on how to define, price, or even categorize. What drew listeners to this in-between thing? Why did RCA Victor invent it? And why, decades after the vinyl era ended, does it keep coming back?

• 2. The Format That Competed With Itself

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  RCA Victor introduced the Extended Play 45 in 1952, partly as a response to the long-play record Columbia had launched in 1948. The core engineering problem was speed. A standard 7-inch 45 rpm single could hold only about four minutes of audio per side. By narrowing the grooves and lowering the cutting levels, RCA's engineers pushed that limit to as much as 7.5 minutes per side while keeping the disc compatible with any standard 45 rpm phonograph. The result sat between two worlds: the brevity of the single and the depth of the LP.

  EMI issued the first EPs in Britain in April 1954, typically compiling four songs across two sides. The manufacturing price was a little more than a regular single, which made them a genuine bargain for listeners who wanted LP tracks without paying LP prices. Early record companies even pressed entire LP albums split across multiple EPs, usually two 7-inch EPs for a 10-inch LP or three for a 12-inch LP, sometimes selling them together in gatefold covers. That practice faded when phonographs capable of multiple speeds became widely available.

• 3. Elvis, Pat Boone, and a Chart's Brief Life

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  RCA's success with the EP format ran largely through Elvis Presley. Between 1956 and 1967 the label issued 28 EPs by Presley alone, many of which topped Billboard's dedicated EP chart. That chart had launched in October 1957, and Billboard's editors observed at the time that the teenage market was clearly driving the business. Alongside Presley's four entries in the top ten, Pat Boone held two and Little Richard one.

  Other publications ran their own EP charts during this period, including Record Retailer, the New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Disc and Music Echo, and the Record Mirror. The format was far more popular in the United Kingdom and parts of Europe than in the United States or Canada, where it remained relatively niche outside of RCA's output. In Sweden the EP's dominance was especially striking: as much as 85 percent of the record market in the late 1950s consisted of EPs. In the UK the format would hold strong until around 1967 before the LP fully eclipsed it.

• 4. Punk, Indie, and the EP Revival

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  When the EP lost ground to the LP in the early 1960s in the United States and began fading in Britain by the late 1960s, it did not disappear. Punk rock gave it new purpose in the late 1970s. In that era, EPs became a practical vehicle for releasing new original material quickly and cheaply. The Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch EP stands as a noted example from that revival. Ricardo Baca of The Denver Post wrote in 2010 that EPs had "long been popular with punk and indie bands," a relationship that outlasted punk itself.

  The British band Cocteau Twins demonstrated the format's longevity by releasing ten EPs between 1982 and 1995. The format also adapted to new physical media: 12-inch vinyl EPs, cassette releases, and eventually CD singles. Some bands, including The Locust, used the 8 cm, 3-inch CD format for EP releases, as with their 1997 self-titled EP. In Britain, the Beatles had already shown the format's commercial ceiling when their Twist and Shout EP outsold most singles for several weeks in 1963. Cliff Richard and the Shadows, both individually and as collaborators, were also among the most prolific EP artists of that decade in the UK.

• 5. The Digital Marketing Angle

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  By the late 2000s, music downloads and streaming had made the EP a strategic tool for pop musicians rather than simply a physical format. A Vanity Fair article from October 2010 described post-album EPs as "the next step in extending albums' shelf lives," following the deluxe-edition trend of adding tracks and re-releasing. Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster in 2009 and Kesha's Cannibal in 2010 were both released as EPs following their debut albums.

  A 2019 Forbes article documented Miley Cyrus's plan to release her seventh studio album as a trilogy of EPs beginning with She Is Coming, framing the strategy as a way to give fans music in installments and maintain promotional momentum over a longer period. That plan was ultimately scrapped in favor of releasing the material as a conventional album called Plastic Hearts. Colbie Caillat took a different approach with her fifth album Gypsy Heart in 2014, releasing the first five tracks as an EP called Gypsy Heart: Side A three months before the full album appeared. Jessie J's fourth studio album R.O.S.E. in 2018 was split into four separate EPs issued on four consecutive days, each named for one letter of the title: R for Realisations, O for Obsessions, S for Sex, and E for Empowerment. Warner Bros. Records also revived the EP format in 2010 with a six-song compact disc offering called the Six-Pak.

• 6. The Double EP and Its Uses

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  A double EP is two discs, each of which qualifies as an EP on its own, packaged together. The analogy is to the double album. The format has a practical logic: smaller pressing plants built for single production can produce pairs of 7-inch discs more readily than a full 12-inch LP. Capitol Records released a number of double EPs in the 1950s, among them sets by Les Paul, whose pair of double EPs was described on the original covers as "parts of a four-part album."

  The Beatles released the first double EP in Britain: the Magical Mystery Tour film soundtrack, issued in December 1967 on EMI's Parlophone label. It spread six songs across two 7-inch discs and came packaged with a color booklet. In the United States, the release was augmented with the band's 1967 single A- and B-sides to create a full LP, a practice the article notes was common in the US but seen as exploitative in the UK. Joe Meek released four tracks from his planned I Hear a New World album on an EP marked "Part 1" in 1960; a second EP was planned but never appeared, and only its sleeve was printed. Cabaret Voltaire released their studio album 2x45 on Rough Trade in 1982, spread across four sides of two 12-inch discs at 45 rpm, with graphics by Neville Brody. The band followed it with a second album in the same format, Drinking Gasoline, on Virgin Records in 1985.

• 7. Defining the Indefinite

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  Contemporary EPs generally contain up to eight tracks and run between 15 and 30 minutes, but the official definitions vary depending on who is keeping the ledger. In the United States, the Recording Industry Association of America defines an EP as a release under 30 minutes containing three to five songs, at least for certification purposes. The Recording Academy's Grammy rules draw the line differently: any release with five or more distinct songs and a running time over 15 minutes counts as an album. The two bodies do not agree, and neither addresses the other's definition.

  In the United Kingdom, the Official Chart Company classifies anything with more than four tracks or more than 25 minutes as an album for sales-chart purposes. A qualifying release priced as a single will not appear on the main album chart but can appear in the Budget Albums chart. The lines blur further at the upper boundary, where the mini-LP sits between the EP and the full album, typically running 20 to 30 minutes with around seven tracks. In South Korea, mini albums are a standard promotional category for releases longer than a single but shorter than a studio album; artists like 2NE1 and Strawberry Milk have incorporated the chronological placement of a mini album directly into its title. Following the spread of CDs, downloads, and streaming, the article notes that definitive distinctions among singles, EPs, and LPs have become elusive, a situation the jukebox EP anticipated decades earlier when Seeburg began pressing 7-inch, 33 rpm versions of LPs in 1962 for jukebox use.