A quick EPisode

The era of CDs that contained full albums is a thing of the past. Representation pic

At tribute it to the age of instant gratification, but there's a noticeable trend in the music industry. Extended Plays, or EPs - which earlier would have at least four to five songs - are often launched as just a two-song or three-song product these days. The Indian indie music industry had a flurry of such releases recently, with artistes including Sidd Coutto, Father Son and Alcohol, and Spitfire coming out with EPs that had only three tracks. We had written in 2018 about how albums have been facing an existential crisis for a while. It's rare for a 21st-century listener to devote an hour and a half to a record that has 15 tracks. Singles and EPs have made them as redundant as a manual worker who's lost his job to an automated machine. But why is it that even EPs are now becoming almost as short in duration as the time it takes to rustle up a bowl of instant noodles?

Rohan Ganguli

Danish Chaudhary, who works in global music discovery and promotion for a social media giant, feels that the first reason is consumer mentality itself. He says, "There's something called ‘attention economy' that's pioneered by short-format content platforms who don't want to lose sight of their users. These apps are competing with sleep, because users have little time during their waking hours; the time they are spending on the app is extracted from their sleep. And in order to keep these hungry users going, you need to keep feeding them more and more content. That's why you see not only smaller EPs these days, but also shorter singles that are just three-minutes long instead of five or six."

Sidd Coutto

Chaudhary predicts a future that is geared towards apps with short-format music content where tracks are just 30 seconds to a maximum of one-minute long. He adds that another factor behind shorter EPs is that artistes are paid per stream, and not according to the time a listener spends on their music. "So, if a song is played twice, they are paid twice. And the problem arises when they create a tune with that in mind, because then the music gets compromised," Chaudhary reasons.

Danish Chaudhary

But, speaking from an artiste's point of view, Mumbai-based Coutto tells us that when he knows that the listener is unlikely to listen to a whole album, why should he bother launching one anyway? "You have to spend time with a band for months on end for an album, making, say, 40 songs before cutting it down to 20 or something. But who's going to listen to that? I don't think my mum has that sort of time either," he laughs, adding that it's the reason why he has decided to launch one three-track EP in each month of 2021, instead of a larger body of work.

And yet, there is still a breed of independent musicians who refuse to give into prevailing trends and market forces, choosing instead to stick to the traditional format of launching music that existed before the digital revolution. Rohan Ganguli is one of them. The guitarist released two critically acclaimed albums with The Supersonics, a defunct post-punk band, and is now in the process of finalising his debut record as a solo artiste. The Kolkata resident tells us that short EPs are like watching just the highlights of the goals instead of an entire football match. "Imagine listening to a Bach composition, but only the best parts. It's like that. But there is a story behind an album and it takes a long time to make. So, the quality will be a lot higher since your investment levels are stretched and your involvement is at a deeper level. An album captures a sizeable time frame in the life of an artiste, but an EP can't do that. It can capture only a few weeks or months."

He adds that this model won't work in the long run because where earlier you would have one artiste playing 10 songs, you now have 10 artistes playing 10 tracks. That means attention spans are getting even smaller and divided. Chaudhary, echoes the point, "There is an American musician, Olivia Rodrigo, who released a track called Driver's License earlier this month, which became one of the most-streamed tracks on Spotify in a single day. But who will really remember it three weeks from now? So, pop stars can't sit idle anymore, and that exhausts them. [As an artiste] you have to thus keep feeding the monsthat the industry has created, with help from you."