From Short EPs to 36-Song Albums, Country Embraces the ‘Collection’ Era
Written by djfrosty on April 18, 2023
Size matters. And if country albums were real estate, the property would range from tiny houses to mansions, expanded by a host of duplexes and apartment complexes.
Morgan Wallen‘s No. 1 album One Thing at a Time boasts a hefty 36 tracks, while Bailey Zimmerman‘s top 10 Leave the Light On features a more traditional nine. Jason Aldean dropped two sets, Macon and Georgia, that were intended to form a double album, Macon, Georgia. ERNEST stretched his Flower Shops project into the deluxe Two Dozen Roses album. Mitchell Tenpenny and Dustin Lynch have released EPs offering as few as three songs, and Alana Springsteen recently put out a six-song EP, Twenty Something: Messing It Up, that represents the first of three volumes that will fill out as an 18-track album. The options are wide enough that official press releases sometimes avoid distinguishing between albums and EPs, instead referring to a new release as an innocuous “collection.”
Numerous country executives have confessed to confusion over the developments — how many different versions of an album/EP/collection are there? And which product level is a particular artist working? It’s not clear if music buyers, who may only focus on just a handful of individual artists, are as flummoxed.
“If we’re going to be completely honest, they might be a little confused as to ‘OK — is this an album? Is it an EP or LP? Is it a digital single bundle?’” Big Loud senior vp/GM Patch Culbertson says. “But really, they’re not tripping over themselves too much as to what it truly is. It’s just ‘Is this great music that’s being pushed to me from this artist?’”
That “digital single” reference is behind the range of options. When music was tied to physical formats, vinyl albums could hold only 22-23 minutes of music on one side before the sound quality began to deteriorate. CDs were limited to 79 minutes.
Record labels were free to issue two- or three-disc projects, but manufacturing the extra disc and/or odd-size packaging incurred an extra cost.
In the streaming age, those limitations disappeared. The audience was able to pick specific tracks out of a collection for streaming or downloading, and its consumption simultaneously became easier to track. As a result, labels now tailor the size of new album or EP releases to a range of factors, particularly the artists’ recording volume and the demand of the fan base.
“It varies by every single artist in every situation,” says Sony Music Nashville COO Ken Robold. “I’d like to say, ‘Yeah, here’s the formula,’ but there really isn’t one anymore. It boils down to where the artist is with the songs and where they are in their fan development stage.”
Figuring out the right formula for a particular artist is more art than science, even though there’s plenty of data to work with. In the case of Wallen, who landed 35 cuts from his 36-song One Thing on the Hot Country Songs chart dated March 18, all the material was consumed by a ready public. But if a label is too aggressive and releases more songs by an artist than the audience desires, some of that music will likely get overlooked.
“If you’re Morgan Wallen and the world’s on fire, there’ll be a lot of people that listen to it,” says Brantley Gilbert, whose 10-song So Help Me God will become a 15-track project with the April 21 release of a deluxe edition. “But depending on where somebody is in their career, a lot of these cats, if you release a 15-, 20-song album, you may have a few die-hards roll all the way through it, but you end up burning a lot of songs.”
Those die-hards are the core audience for an artist, and steadily releasing music helps keep them focused, even if a concurrent radio campaign satisfies more passive customers with a lone song from that artist that stays in rotation for over a year.
“People are listening at an alarming rate to a lot of music,” ERNEST says. “Giving them a chunk is like giving them a playlist for a month or two, depending on how long they want to listen.”
Feeding the demand can be accomplished in more incremental ways than when physical product was dominant. In another era, labels typically released entire albums and picked one single to work to radio, hoping to generate sales for the entire project. Now, a lone track can create interest, and there’s no requirement to immediately capitalize with a full album that may not quite connect.
“It’s a song-by-song world now,” says Robold. “You’re just sort of stacking songs on top of one another. That way, an EP, it sort of introduces fans to this artist, not in such a huge dose. But it hopefully just gets more fans to say, ‘OK, I like this artist,’ and continue to feed that fan base and grow it.”
The projects with 30 tracks or more by Wallen and others are high-profile releases that have definite short-term appeal. Under the old model, they carried long-term risks. When vinyl double albums became a late-’70s/early-’80s fad, two-disc projects by the likes of Willie Nelson and Bruce Springsteen worked like bonus entries in a streak of ongoing successes. On the other hand, double sets by Elton John, The Electric Light Orchestra and Dan Fogelberg were followed by commercial drops one or two albums later, likely signaling that fans had gotten their fill of those particular acts. Thus far, there’s no sign that stuffing 30-plus songs into an album has adversely affected Wallen or others.
“It’s a fair question: Are you kind of super-saturating the market?’ ” Culbertson asks. “Really the amount of data that we have access to, we can tell if that is happening or if there’s kind of a cooling-off effect. Right now, it’s not a concern at all.”
That may partially be because music fans no longer have to purchase music they don’t like. When buyers had to pay for the entire album, it likely damaged the artist’s brand if the collection failed to meet expectations. Now the buyer/streamer doesn’t end up forking over money for music that doesn’t connect, and the consumer therefore doesn’t necessarily feel burned. But it often takes longer for artists to get a full investment from the audience.
“It’s difficult to break artists, but it always has been,” notes Robold. “When people’s only option was to buy a CD, if you had something working, it was a pretty good sort of level of comfort that people would be spending the 12 bucks to buy that CD. Now it’s literally micro-pennies, and it’s building it song by song. That’s really, really tough, but when artists connect, there’s still nothing like it.”