Album or EP, where is the line drawn?

Back in the day, an album simply meant a collection of 78 RPM discs bundled together, at least in musical terms. However, that all changed with the invention of the LP in 1948. Now you can hold up to 45 minutes (and even longer) on a 12 inch disc.

However, 12 inch discs were reserved for classical albums while pop albums were issued on smaller 10 inch discs, typically having 8 tracks (4 per side) and a runtime of approximately 20 to 25 minutes. While this seems like an EP by today’s standards, this is what an album looked like back in the late 40’s and early 50’s.

Of course, pop albums got bigger and bigger (in big thanks to Frank Sinatra’s 1956 album In The Wee Small Hours) to the point where 10 inch discs were mostly used as a novelty. By the 1960’s, albums had anywhere from 10 to 14 tracks (5 to 7 per side) with a runtime of approximately 25 to 35 minutes with EP’s typically having 4 tracks (2 per side).

However, that all changed in 1967 with The Beatles. You see, when it came to releasing Magical Mystery Tour, they had too much songs for an EP but too little for an album. Of course, Capitol solved this in North America by tacking on their 1967 singles onto side B but that’s not something Brits like. In the end, they eventually decided on a 19 minute long 6 track double EP, which would’ve been an album by 1948 standards but isn’t by 1960’s standards.

Sadly, that was only the start, with a variety of albums, such as Brian May’s Star Fleet, Alice In Chain’s Jar Of Flies, and Maroon 5’s The B-Side Collection fringing the line between EP and album.

So how do we determine what’s an album and what’s an EP?

Well, the Grammy’s state that an album must be at least 15 minutes with 5 distinguishable tracks or 30 minutes with no minimum track requirement while the UK Album Charts state that it must have at least 5 tracks or last for more than 25 minutes and Australia states that it must have at least 6 tracks or last for more than 25 minutes.

Screw the non-American definitions, since a collection of 5 second ringtones would be considered an album.

Of course, the American definition means that many releases referred to as EP’s are actually albums.