Justin Bieber only put out his Changes album in February but has followed it up with plans to chop it up into EP-sized compilations and release those individually.
“Gonna be putting up some compilations for you guys,” he tweeted about his plans. “Tuesdays and Thursdays. Here is the first one.” He then linked through to the release on Apple Music, Spotify and Amazon Music.
The first in the series is titled R&Bieber and it contains a riff on the original album artwork, but switching to a green cover as opposed to a red one. It is made up of a run of five tracks that all appear on Changes, including the title track.
The second release in the series is called Work From Home and had the same red artwork as Changes. It not only features ‘Changes’ like R&Bieber does, it also features ‘Available’, suggesting these are not exactly separate releases. It adds an acoustic version of ‘Intentions’, a track that had been released separately as a single. The third release is called Biebs and Chill (!) and also contains ‘Changes’ as well as ‘Habitual’ (which appears on R&Bieber) alongside three other tracks from the album.
It’s not really clear what exactly is going on here. It is not like he is restructuring the album like Kanye West did with his The Life Of Pablo album in 2016 where he added tracks, removed tracks and shifted the running order, seemingly at random, treating the album as a palimpsest.
While not a total deconstruction of an album, it feels like it is being squeezed into new shapes as a series of mini playlists. There is nothing technically new in these new EPs (it’s worth noting that Spotify is classing them within the Singles & EPs category rather than Albums), and maybe it’s just an experiment to get users to tackle the album in more accessible chunks rather than in one 17-track sitting.
Perhaps this is what albums will become: an initial dumping ground for a number of tracks that get chopped up and repackaged in a multitude of ways until they find the perfect combination that sends the streaming algorithms into overdrive.
