Are EPs Extending The Buzz Of New Artists, Or Giving Them The Short End Of The Stick?

Al Shipley | March 4, 2008 5:10 am
In the high-risk, low-reward business of trying to introduce new artists into a slumping marketplace, hip hop labels have a lot of coping mechanisms at their disposal. The most common approach, of releasing single after single until one does well enough to assure decent first-week album sales, is still as popular as ever–as is the method of simply dumping the album in stores with a nonexistent promotional budget and then blaming its failure on the artist. But more and more over the past couple years, a third way to screw both the artist and the consumer has emerged as an alternative: EPs.

Extended Players–which are probably best defined as a record that’s shorter than an album, but longer than a single–have always played a nebulous role in the recording industry. They’ve gone in and out of vogue in indie rock and dance music circles over the years, but one genre in which they’ve never held much significance is hip-hop. There may have been a few popular EPs in its early years, but no classics; rap has no Chronic Town. A few years ago, during its crunk-fueled peak that recently came to a crashing halt, TVT Records came to briefly favor them as victory-lap releases, chasing successful albums by Lil Jon, Pitbull and the Ying Yang Twins with EPs chock full of remixes and outtakes to strike while the iron was hot. More recently, though, major labels have turned to them as a way to rush out low-budget debut releases for new artists to whom they’re not ready to make a full-album commitment.

In 2006, Jive Records signed the Berkeley, Calif., teenagers The Pack on the strength of their shoe-endorsing hit “Vans.” But when the song peaked in the top 40 later that year, the label only released the Skateboards 2 Scrapers EP to capitalize on it. And when the group’s follow-up singles failed to generate anywhere near the success of “Vans” and the hyphy bubble where they’d risen to prominence had burst, their 2007 full-length debut Based Boys was left out to dry, selling even fewer copies than its teaser EP. Similiarly, when Chicago rapper Yung Berg’s single “Sexy Lady” peaked last summer, his label Epic, which needed help from indie label Koch just to break the song at radio, only dropped Almost Famous: The Sexy Lady EP to capitalize on it. But Berg’s proper debut album, due out this year, might have better luck than The Pack’s, given that his collaboration with Ray J, “Sexy Can I,” is currently on its way to becoming bigger than his previous hit. Orange County rapper Ca$his, signed to Eminem’s Shady Records, released an EP, The County Hound last year, with a full-length due out in 2008. But unlike Yung Berg or The Pack, Ca$his had no hit single at the time, and should probably be happy he got any kind of release out on the label, given that Shady’s new artist was Obie Trice, who was launched nearly five years ago.

The trend doesn’t look to be slowing down anytime soon: yesterday, Jermaine Dupri told MTV News that he may issue an EP from his latest Def Jam signing, DJ Felli Fel, before putting an album on the label’s release schedule. And when Houston rapper Mike Jones lost the platinum luster of his 2005 debut during the long wait for his 2007 album The American Dream, he ended up scrapping the album and combing four of its songs with two previous hits for a bonus EP that accompanied a DVD of the same name.

The elephant in the room regarding hip-hop EPs is thrown into stark relief once Lil Wayne, who’s released literally dozens of songs via mixtapes since his last official album, is brought into the conversation. Wayne–whose Tha Carter III has been the most anticipated rap album of this year, last year, and the year before that–got into the EP business in December, when he released the five-song The Leak to make up for the incessant delays that have plagued the album. For the past decade, pretty much every mainstream rapper worth his salt has released more material on mixtapes and collaborations than on their own major label releases. To toss a paltry handful of songs and a bonus remix out in stores as a teaser, when you can probably hear hours worth of material from the same artist at any number of mixtape spots or Web sites, isn’t just a cheat on the artist that has more than enough songs ready for an album. It’s a ripoff for the consumer, who pays just a little less for a lot less music. If they pay for it at all.

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