what do ep & lp stand for on albums and what is the difference
EP= Extended Play
Usually one or two cuts per side.
LP = Long Play
The designator for the 33 1/3 RPM record. Designed to hold approximately 25 minutes per side.
Both of them are manufactured on a 12" blank.
EP is Extended Play, and LP is Long Play. LPs are the standard long playing albums, while EPs are generally shorter, often with fewer tracks, IIRC.
What Rico said, 'cept I’ve seen them on a 10" too.
In case you’re wondering about the “extended” reference to the aforementioned “short albums”…
“Extended Play” initially came about to describe singles with a long playing time (sometimes referred to as “extended mix”). “EP” tracks are the ones that have not been abridged for radio play. Broadcast songs are typically between two and four minutes in length, whereas an EP can be much longer, sometimes reflecting its actual stage performance length.
Example/ Performance length of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” often exceeds 10:58, if this full-length version was released as a single it wold be an EP, not a standard “single” or “radio edit”.
More recently, EP is used to refer to albums with fewer songs that a full-length LP (e.g./ six songs). Sometimes EPs are initially created as a “demo”.
Considering EPs predated extended mixes by at least a decade, Eats, your explanation doesn’t fit.
The EP format was used in the 50s and 60s, and was much more popular in the UK than the US. Typically, an EP had two songs per side; it could be either 8", 10", or 12". It was different from a single, which had one song on each side.
US albums had a total of 10-12 songs in the beginning (UK LPs had 14).
EPs never caught on in the US and eventually faded out in the UK.
Ah, for f*ck’s sake the hamsters ate my post!
RealityChuck – actually, I just worded my post horrendously. I wasn’t referring to the “extended mixes” that were popular in the 80’s but rather “extended recordings that were longer than ‘singles’.” Remember, pop music wasn’t the only stuff out there.
Early recordings were (very fragile) 78 rpms records that could hold about ten minutes worth of music – big pain in the butt for classical music with longer compositions.
So in 1948, Columbia came out with the micro-groove “LP” (long-playing) that had a speed of 33 1/3 rpm. It could manage about 40 minutes of music (roughly 20-25 minutes each side). Much appreciated by their classical music repertoire
Always the competitor, RCA Victor came out with their own the 7" inch micro-groove “EP” that spun around at 45 rpm. This format was most popular for pop tunes. But it could only hold about four “sides” – either two regular-lengths songs, or one “extended” piece that was more likely to be performance length (like an improvised jazz riff in which the musicians just didn’t know when to stop).
So my apologies for the sloppy wording of my earlier post.
Oh, BTW – RCA’s fancy micro-groove “EP” was introduced in 1949.
Stereo records came out some time around 1957 or 1958 ( I can’t remember and I’m too lazy to hunt through my books.)
It’s my understanding that Robert Plant refused to release Stairway as a single because he felt that he could not promote listening to it outside of the context of the album.
Err, but yeah. What everyone else above me said is correct 
Yeah, I know… But it was the only song I could think of off the top of my head that could really illustrate a crazy “performance length” recording (though I’m sure that there’s probably some endless, live version of “Hotel California” somewhere out there too.)
…Led Zep’s ‘Dazed and Confused’ would be a good chioce for that 
Or Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida which is a little over 17 min long on the performance version