This music industry trend of artists taking their back catalog, rearranging the songs into new compilation albums and EPs, and putting out those compilations as new releases is starting to irritate me a little bit.
I really don't know where this started, but the first artist I noticed doing it was Taylor Swift. A few weeks after releasing her album Folklore, Taylor began releasing new EPs where she took the tracks on Folklore, put them into new groups of six tracks based on theme, and released these groups of tracks as new EPs with titles like "folklore: the escapism chapter" and "folklore: the saltbox house chapter." And it wasn't clear at that point that this was one episode of a larger trend, but scrolling through some recent releases right now, I can see that Lewis Capaldi, Florence + The Machine, Maggie Rogers, Rascal Flatts, Jason Mraz, and even Billy Joel have all done similar "thematic EP" releases in the last handful of weeks.
And I understand from the business side of the music industry why this is advantageous: finding ways to repackage material and present old songs in a new light is a perfect way to make the listener re-engage with older songs, which leads to that listener streaming the artist more and therefore generate more revenue for the label that owns the music. Makes sense.
But from the artistic side of music, I really don't love the way this feels. To me, taking a painstakingly recorded album and quickly breaking it down into gimmicky thematic EPs feels like taking the Mona Lisa and printing it on a bunch of crap street vendor t-shirts. The artist should know the best context in which to experience their work, and he or she shouldn't feel the pressure to duplicate it across a small army of releases purely to expose more people. Great artists should make catering a top-tier listening experience one of their highest priorities when recording new music, but artists lose control of that listening experience once a song is available to be heard on seven different releases and remixes, all of which are buried in a now overly bloated "Singles & EPs" section of an artist's Apple Music page.
Now, are these EP releases the worst thing to happen to music since Napster? Absolutely not. But it definitely looks messy and feels like a desperate attempt by the music industry to keep streaming numbers afloat during an artist's off-season, and I don't think it's landing super well.
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