FRED.. Play It Again 2
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Inspired by Fred again..
The music industry has a long history of internal anachronism, words and phrases from earlier days that survive long after the technology that spawned the terms disappeared. In the early rock and roll era of the mid to late 1950s, disc jockeys of the day referred to hit songs as “hot wax,” a reference to cylinders coated with wax, the earliest commercial medium for selling recorded music.
By the time Elvis Presley reached the height of his early popularity, wax cylinders had been out of favor for over 40 years. Teens of the era likely had little idea why their favorite record spinner used “wax” when they purchased recordings made of shellac or vinyl. However, radio was the culture of cool in those days, and DJs were the arbiters of teen culture. If they called it wax, that was good enough.
While there have always been a range of music reproduction media, it was perhaps the most stable in the 30-year period between 1955 and 1985. The vinyl disc reigned supreme in two sizes, two speeds, and three formats.
The single was a seven-inch disc, two-sided with a 1.5-inch hole in the center, meant to rotate at a speed of 45 revolutions per minute (RPM). The LP, or long-playing record, most frequently appeared as a 12-inch disc with a small central hole with a diameter of about 0.283, a little over ¼-inch, and played at 33-1/3 RPM.
Between these was the extended-play record, or EP. Its format varied more than the single or LP, but the most common form was a seven-inch disc played at 33-1/3 RPM, usually with 2 songs on each side. It also used the 0.283-inch hole.
In North America, the single was king through the late 1950s and into the 1960s. The record industry and radio revolved around the three-minute long single, a length perfectly suited for the 45 RPM record, which carried one song on each side.
The new consumers
It also perfectly suited the small but growing amounts of disposable income to which teens had access, and the rock and roll craze seemed focused on this newly defined demographic group that previously had little buying power. Grabbing those newly available dollars fueled the business end of singles, and the market was lucrative enough to drive questionable practices through the record and radio industries.
Rock and roll and teen music can’t shoulder all the blame for the payola scandal, but it became a focal point for it. DJs received money, perks, swag, and bribes from record companies to play certain records on the air. Since DJs of the time had control over playlists, their music choices could have a major influence over the popularity of a particular record.
Music over the radio exploded during the 1950s. At the start of the decade there were about 250 disc jockeys working in radio nationwide. Seven years later, that number was over 5,000. Record companies couldn’t ignore that influence over sales and payola was a fact of life until suppressed by a United States House Oversight Committee at the end of the decade.
But what of the format itself? Why did the single have such a big hole when compared with EPs and LPs? For those who are familiar with the VHS versus Betamax battle, the idea of competing proprietary systems comes as no surprise, and the classic format of the 45 RPM single arose from exactly such a case.
As it happened, the 33-1/3 RPM format belonged to Columbia Records. Introducing a disc format using this speed along with the 0.283-inch center hole meant forking over licensing fees to Columbia. RCA felt they were too big to kowtow to their competitor, so they invented their own format.
Though it’s something of a generalization, RCA tended toward popular music, while Columbia carried more classical titles. The 33-1/3 RPM format introduced in 1948 focused on the LP, a 22-minute per side music playback medium.
RCA developed a format that focused around shorter pieces and manufactured the hardware to support it. The 45 RPM single had a maximum length of about 6 minutes, and the large center hole facilitated stacking on a special spindle with all the moving parts mounted inside the spindle.
Since a listener could stack as many as 10 singles onto this spindle, which would drop a new record onto the turntable after the previous one finished, there was a potential for nearly 60 minutes of uninterrupted music versus the measly 22 minutes offered by the LP. There was also no need to listen to one artist. Multidisc turntables using 45s gave the flexibility necessary to create custom playlists, simply by stacking your choice of 45s.
The extended play record is perhaps the bastard child of the record industry, at least in the North American market. The EP emerged in various formats, with different numbers of songs. Unlike the 45 RPM single, often marketed in blank paper sleeves, the EP could have graphic sleeves like LPs, which may or may not feature LP-like card stock.
Though RCA saw success by repackaging Elvis material into EPs, many of which topped the short-lived Billboard EP chart, the format never caught on with consumers in Canada and the U.S. However, the United Kingdom loved the EP. So, too, did other European countries including Sweden, where the EP accounted for 85% of the recorded music market. Asia was another hotspot, and there the EP took other forms, such as a 78 RPM 10-inch disc.
Content on EPs was often a bit exploitive, comprised of already released material, perhaps a repackaging of singles that had fallen from the charts combined with one or two album cuts. This was often a brazen way to encouraging additional sales of existing material to fans driven by an urge to own “everything” by their favorite artists. Often, there was nothing original at all about an EP, with even the sleeve graphics recycled from albums or stock photographs of the artist.
Slightly more ethical in intent was the EP that acted as an album sampler. During the height of the singles era, the comparatively high price of LPs divided consumers into groups who stayed resolutely on their side. The album sampler gave singles buyers access to album cuts at a budget price, perhaps stimulating the odd album sale based on increased interest.
However, the EP never coalesced in concept. Every attempt to define what an EP is has endless examples of contradiction. There are EPs with exclusive and unreleased material. There are cardboard and plain paper sleeves, 10 and 12-inch diameters using all turntable speeds, and EPs even emerged as novelties in the 1970s and 80s, another weak attempt to make collectibles out of mass-produced products.
Likely the asterisk of the vinyl disc era of North American music media, the EP shows new potential for the digital era, still filling a space between the single and the long player.
Released as a monophonic analog sound medium in 1948, using a specification dubbed microgroove, this new format represented a major improvement over the 78 RPM record that previously dominated, since these used shellac, a sticky and abrasive substance that require a thick and robust stylus to plow through a wide groove, creating plenty of noise as well as music.
Vinyl records with microgrooves used styluses with much finer points, creating much less friction. With few changes, the microgroove LP was the gold standard for consumer audio until the advent of the Compact Disc in the mid-1980s.
The one major revision of the format was the introduction of stereo playback, which was backwards compatible with earlier mono recordings. A stylus compatible with microgrooves could pick up discrete signals from the music encoded on each side of a V-shaped groove, converting the oscillations to separate coils, which each fed one channel of a stereo amplifier. When output to left and right speakers oriented in a rough equilateral triangle with the listener’s pair of ears, three-dimensional sound staging was now possible.
The early days of the LP served up classical music as a priority, leading to a somewhat slow adoption of the format. However, though the LP still trailed the 78 RPM in sales in 1952, by 1958 the 12-inch LP led the market and 78s were an afterthought fringe product.
During this time, popular music artists like Frank Sinatra introduced LPs that began to follow loose themes. This ran counter to the record company practice of naming an LP after its one hit song, then filling the rest of the disc with whatever filler they could scrounge from the artist. Continuity, style, or consistency be damned. The LP was high-end product designed to milk dollars from fans yet another way. It was simple to own a single song on all three formats, 45, EP, and LP.
Though early albums by The Beatles featured songs of surprising quality from beginning to end, this was an accident of talent, as their producer freely admitted recording these LPs hastily to capitalize on what was expected to be short-term popularity. It wasn’t until 1965’s “Rubber Soul” album that The Beatles deliberately set out to make album-length statements intended to stand on works as their own.
The apogee of this idea was perhaps “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” a loose concept based on the band taking anonymity behind the fictional Sgt. Pepper band. Or so it was for Paul McCartney, at least. George Harrison and John Lennon disavowed the concept idea, considering the Pepper album just another collection of unrelated songs, albeit works of startling quality that captured the spirit of its time. Regardless of their intent, Pepper opened the gates for many future objets d’art of widely varied presumptuousness.
When you consider the vinyl versions of single, EP, and LP, the most durable format is, of course, the LP which endures to this day, having never quite seen death at the hands of digital music media. The EP’s life, scattered and tragic, never reached anything like a consistent identity. The single started to pass about the time the popular LP became a “serious” artistic statement. The 45 lived on, slipping down the age scale of consumers, a teenybopper medium by the time it was irrelevant.
As introduced, the LP could play 22 minutes a side without interruption or human intervention. The 78 that it replaced could only stretch out to five minutes in its most common format. Improved materials meant that stylus friction created less noise as a side effect of the playback process with LPs, and the 22-minute barrier later stretched out by several minutes. Its 38-year lifespan as the best game in town qualifies it as the most durable recorded music medium in popular use, and it’s still regarded fondly today, with many acts releasing vinyl versions of otherwise digital releases.
Just as “hot wax” endured long after the demise of its namesake, so too do “single,” “EP,” “LP,” and “album” in the digital downloadable music universe. Digital music takes away the artifact that we hold in our hands. The 12-inch square LP cover was a possession, a piece of art separate from the music, and in some cases, it had the gravitas of an historical document.
Today, when songs exist mostly as computer files tucked away on phones and tablets and hard drives, something is lost, even though the terms that describe vinyl continue. The music industry is back to the start of the circle, the foundation of its existence, really: the single. The song is the fundamental unit that drives iTunes sales and YouTube plays while filling playlists on services like Spotify and Pandora.
Yet, despite its renewed importance, the single still leaves room for the EP, assisted by the LP. It’s a synergistic blend with a dynamic that changed drastically in the CD era. Freed from the constraint of 45-minute programming on two sides of an LP, the CD album started the trend for longer works by many artists, taking advantage of the new 74-minute standard.
However, more time in the studio means longer delays between releases. Since popularity can be fleeting, and since new releases start the exposure cycle, the EP sees new life in the digital world as a way for artists to stay connected with listeners who expect immediate gratification in all things, from downloadable software to same-day Amazon deliveries.
The album concept still exists and still vies for Bluetooth speaker dominance as audio art, but its identity is dilute when you can easily slip in and purchase only your favorite tracks. In essence, every song is potentially a single today.
Where will it go? It’s hard to say. Perhaps in 50 years, music fans will talk about “files” instead of “singles,” “folders” instead of “albums,” and it’s anybody’s guess what the always-vague EP might be called. You might not want to bet against “EP” though. It could yet emerge as the music industry’s version of the apocalypse-surviving cockroach, reinventing itself again in every era.
The music industry has a long history of internal anachronism, words and phrases from earlier days that survive long after the technology that spawned the terms disappeared. In the early rock and roll era of the mid to late 1950s, disc jockeys of the day referred to hit songs as “hot wax,” a reference to cylinders coated with wax, the earliest commercial medium for selling recorded music.
By the time Elvis Presley reached the height of his early popularity, wax cylinders had been out of favor for over 40 years. Teens of the era likely had little idea why their favorite record spinner used “wax” when they purchased recordings made of shellac or vinyl. However, radio was the culture of cool in those days, and DJs were the arbiters of teen culture. If they called it wax, that was good enough.
While there have always been a range of music reproduction media, it was perhaps the most stable in the 30-year period between 1955 and 1985. The vinyl disc reigned supreme in two sizes, two speeds, and three formats.
The single was a seven-inch disc, two-sided with a 1.5-inch hole in the center, meant to rotate at a speed of 45 revolutions per minute (RPM). The LP, or long-playing record, most frequently appeared as a 12-inch disc with a small central hole with a diameter of about 0.283, a little over ¼-inch, and played at 33-1/3 RPM.
Between these was the extended-play record, or EP. Its format varied more than the single or LP, but the most common form was a seven-inch disc played at 33-1/3 RPM, usually with 2 songs on each side. It also used the 0.283-inch hole.
In North America, the single was king through the late 1950s and into the 1960s. The record industry and radio revolved around the three-minute long single, a length perfectly suited for the 45 RPM record, which carried one song on each side.
The new consumers
It also perfectly suited the small but growing amounts of disposable income to which teens had access, and the rock and roll craze seemed focused on this newly defined demographic group that previously had little buying power. Grabbing those newly available dollars fueled the business end of singles, and the market was lucrative enough to drive questionable practices through the record and radio industries.
Rock and roll and teen music can’t shoulder all the blame for the payola scandal, but it became a focal point for it. DJs received money, perks, swag, and bribes from record companies to play certain records on the air. Since DJs of the time had control over playlists, their music choices could have a major influence over the popularity of a particular record.
Music over the radio exploded during the 1950s. At the start of the decade there were about 250 disc jockeys working in radio nationwide. Seven years later, that number was over 5,000. Record companies couldn’t ignore that influence over sales and payola was a fact of life until suppressed by a United States House Oversight Committee at the end of the decade.
But what of the format itself? Why did the single have such a big hole when compared with EPs and LPs? For those who are familiar with the VHS versus Betamax battle, the idea of competing proprietary systems comes as no surprise, and the classic format of the 45 RPM single arose from exactly such a case.
As it happened, the 33-1/3 RPM format belonged to Columbia Records. Introducing a disc format using this speed along with the 0.283-inch center hole meant forking over licensing fees to Columbia. RCA felt they were too big to kowtow to their competitor, so they invented their own format.
Though it’s something of a generalization, RCA tended toward popular music, while Columbia carried more classical titles. The 33-1/3 RPM format introduced in 1948 focused on the LP, a 22-minute per side music playback medium.
RCA developed a format that focused around shorter pieces and manufactured the hardware to support it. The 45 RPM single had a maximum length of about 6 minutes, and the large center hole facilitated stacking on a special spindle with all the moving parts mounted inside the spindle.
Since a listener could stack as many as 10 singles onto this spindle, which would drop a new record onto the turntable after the previous one finished, there was a potential for nearly 60 minutes of uninterrupted music versus the measly 22 minutes offered by the LP. There was also no need to listen to one artist. Multidisc turntables using 45s gave the flexibility necessary to create custom playlists, simply by stacking your choice of 45s.
The extended play record is perhaps the bastard child of the record industry, at least in the North American market. The EP emerged in various formats, with different numbers of songs. Unlike the 45 RPM single, often marketed in blank paper sleeves, the EP could have graphic sleeves like LPs, which may or may not feature LP-like card stock.
Though RCA saw success by repackaging Elvis material into EPs, many of which topped the short-lived Billboard EP chart, the format never caught on with consumers in Canada and the U.S. However, the United Kingdom loved the EP. So, too, did other European countries including Sweden, where the EP accounted for 85% of the recorded music market. Asia was another hotspot, and there the EP took other forms, such as a 78 RPM 10-inch disc.
Content on EPs was often a bit exploitive, comprised of already released material, perhaps a repackaging of singles that had fallen from the charts combined with one or two album cuts. This was often a brazen way to encouraging additional sales of existing material to fans driven by an urge to own “everything” by their favorite artists. Often, there was nothing original at all about an EP, with even the sleeve graphics recycled from albums or stock photographs of the artist.
Slightly more ethical in intent was the EP that acted as an album sampler. During the height of the singles era, the comparatively high price of LPs divided consumers into groups who stayed resolutely on their side. The album sampler gave singles buyers access to album cuts at a budget price, perhaps stimulating the odd album sale based on increased interest.
However, the EP never coalesced in concept. Every attempt to define what an EP is has endless examples of contradiction. There are EPs with exclusive and unreleased material. There are cardboard and plain paper sleeves, 10 and 12-inch diameters using all turntable speeds, and EPs even emerged as novelties in the 1970s and 80s, another weak attempt to make collectibles out of mass-produced products.
Likely the asterisk of the vinyl disc era of North American music media, the EP shows new potential for the digital era, still filling a space between the single and the long player.
Released as a monophonic analog sound medium in 1948, using a specification dubbed microgroove, this new format represented a major improvement over the 78 RPM record that previously dominated, since these used shellac, a sticky and abrasive substance that require a thick and robust stylus to plow through a wide groove, creating plenty of noise as well as music.
Vinyl records with microgrooves used styluses with much finer points, creating much less friction. With few changes, the microgroove LP was the gold standard for consumer audio until the advent of the Compact Disc in the mid-1980s.
The one major revision of the format was the introduction of stereo playback, which was backwards compatible with earlier mono recordings. A stylus compatible with microgrooves could pick up discrete signals from the music encoded on each side of a V-shaped groove, converting the oscillations to separate coils, which each fed one channel of a stereo amplifier. When output to left and right speakers oriented in a rough equilateral triangle with the listener’s pair of ears, three-dimensional sound staging was now possible.
The early days of the LP served up classical music as a priority, leading to a somewhat slow adoption of the format. However, though the LP still trailed the 78 RPM in sales in 1952, by 1958 the 12-inch LP led the market and 78s were an afterthought fringe product.
During this time, popular music artists like Frank Sinatra introduced LPs that began to follow loose themes. This ran counter to the record company practice of naming an LP after its one hit song, then filling the rest of the disc with whatever filler they could scrounge from the artist. Continuity, style, or consistency be damned. The LP was high-end product designed to milk dollars from fans yet another way. It was simple to own a single song on all three formats, 45, EP, and LP.
Though early albums by The Beatles featured songs of surprising quality from beginning to end, this was an accident of talent, as their producer freely admitted recording these LPs hastily to capitalize on what was expected to be short-term popularity. It wasn’t until 1965’s “Rubber Soul” album that The Beatles deliberately set out to make album-length statements intended to stand on works as their own.
The apogee of this idea was perhaps “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” a loose concept based on the band taking anonymity behind the fictional Sgt. Pepper band. Or so it was for Paul McCartney, at least. George Harrison and John Lennon disavowed the concept idea, considering the Pepper album just another collection of unrelated songs, albeit works of startling quality that captured the spirit of its time. Regardless of their intent, Pepper opened the gates for many future objets d’art of widely varied presumptuousness.
When you consider the vinyl versions of single, EP, and LP, the most durable format is, of course, the LP which endures to this day, having never quite seen death at the hands of digital music media. The EP’s life, scattered and tragic, never reached anything like a consistent identity. The single started to pass about the time the popular LP became a “serious” artistic statement. The 45 lived on, slipping down the age scale of consumers, a teenybopper medium by the time it was irrelevant.
As introduced, the LP could play 22 minutes a side without interruption or human intervention. The 78 that it replaced could only stretch out to five minutes in its most common format. Improved materials meant that stylus friction created less noise as a side effect of the playback process with LPs, and the 22-minute barrier later stretched out by several minutes. Its 38-year lifespan as the best game in town qualifies it as the most durable recorded music medium in popular use, and it’s still regarded fondly today, with many acts releasing vinyl versions of otherwise digital releases.
Just as “hot wax” endured long after the demise of its namesake, so too do “single,” “EP,” “LP,” and “album” in the digital downloadable music universe. Digital music takes away the artifact that we hold in our hands. The 12-inch square LP cover was a possession, a piece of art separate from the music, and in some cases, it had the gravitas of an historical document.
Today, when songs exist mostly as computer files tucked away on phones and tablets and hard drives, something is lost, even though the terms that describe vinyl continue. The music industry is back to the start of the circle, the foundation of its existence, really: the single. The song is the fundamental unit that drives iTunes sales and YouTube plays while filling playlists on services like Spotify and Pandora.
Yet, despite its renewed importance, the single still leaves room for the EP, assisted by the LP. It’s a synergistic blend with a dynamic that changed drastically in the CD era. Freed from the constraint of 45-minute programming on two sides of an LP, the CD album started the trend for longer works by many artists, taking advantage of the new 74-minute standard.
However, more time in the studio means longer delays between releases. Since popularity can be fleeting, and since new releases start the exposure cycle, the EP sees new life in the digital world as a way for artists to stay connected with listeners who expect immediate gratification in all things, from downloadable software to same-day Amazon deliveries.
The album concept still exists and still vies for Bluetooth speaker dominance as audio art, but its identity is dilute when you can easily slip in and purchase only your favorite tracks. In essence, every song is potentially a single today.
Where will it go? It’s hard to say. Perhaps in 50 years, music fans will talk about “files” instead of “singles,” “folders” instead of “albums,” and it’s anybody’s guess what the always-vague EP might be called. You might not want to bet against “EP” though. It could yet emerge as the music industry’s version of the apocalypse-surviving cockroach, reinventing itself again in every era.
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