The EP was invented to squeeze more music onto a small record
In the late 1940s a 7-inch 45 rpm single held only about four minutes a side. To compete with Columbia's new long-player, RCA Victor launched Extended Play 45s in 1952, cutting narrower grooves so each side could run up to 7.5 minutes while still playing on an ordinary turntable.
Early EPs usually carried two songs a side and cost only a little more than a single, which made them a bargain for fans who could not afford the album. Record companies even sold whole LPs chopped into sets of EPs. Elvis Presley alone had 28 EPs on RCA between 1956 and 1967, and when Billboard launched an EP chart in October 1957 it observed that teenage buyers dominated it.
The format faded in America in the early 1960s but thrived in Europe. Swedish buyers loved them: toward the end of the 1950s, up to 85% of records sold there were EPs. In Britain, Cliff Richard, the Shadows and the Beatles issued them in quantity; for some weeks in 1963 the Beatles' Twist and Shout EP outsold most singles. The Beatles also put out Britain's first double EP, the Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack of December 1967, six songs on two discs with a colour booklet.
Punk revived the EP in the late 1970s as a cheap way to release new material, as with Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch, and indie bands have favoured it ever since. Cocteau Twins released ten between 1982 and 1995. In the streaming era, pop stars use EPs to keep fans fed between albums, as with Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster in 2009, and Jessie J released an album as four EPs on four consecutive days.
Definitions now depend on who is counting. The RIAA calls a release of three to five songs under 30 minutes an EP, while Britain's chart compilers treat anything over 25 minutes as an album. In K-pop and J-pop the format goes by mini-album.
Source: Extended play
