True, people feel very strongly about Daft Punk “Random Access Memories” was going to be a big album no matter what. So that week-plus of leaked versions, from fan-made edits of a one-minute YouTube clip to full iTunes album rips to the huge audiophile homemade 24/96 files I mentioned before? Possibly, as many have said for years, more promo than loss of sales. It has since sold four hundred and thirty-two thousand copies in the U.S. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, the first time Daft Punk had occupied that position. “Random Access Memories” débuted in the United States, on May 21st, at No. Leaks have not hurt Daft Punk, it appears. There is a growing cohort of people who might have grabbed a download just to hear a track, simply out of excitement, but were only ever going to stream it-they were not potential buyers. Assessing loss of sales is harder now with streaming services like Spotify, “cannibalization” is impossible to track. Do leaks hurt album sales? This Time magazine piece from three years ago points to bigger and smaller artists whose albums didn’t suffer commercially when leaked early, sometimes months before the official sales date. Here’s where the Daft Punk story gets confusing. It’s terrifying to think that if Daft Punk had worked with professionals like Pharrell for the whole album, they might have made the “Thriller” they suggest they did (they didn’t) with a subtle design reference on their album cover. I am not bothered that it contains no revelations, wit, or wisdom. “Random Access Memories” is a tangibly passionate effort. It doesn’t matter what I think of the taste behind these choices they love this schizophrenic mess, and worked ferociously hard to use that love to make a concrete piece of sound. Did I end up loving Paul Williams and his mini-opera? Do I understand why someone would want to hear a dull interview with the disco legend Giorgio Moroder more than once? Do I know why Daft Punk is so fond of B-list jazz fusion? “No” to all of these questions-yet, when I play the album from top to bottom, I am happy. Given more time, I might have noted that Daft Punk’s custom-built modular synthesizer makes some cronut-halving bass sounds, and that the tentative and icy “ Instant Crush,” featuring Julian Casablancas of the Strokes, would be a great summer hit. So you play it again, to make sure, and start dancing while Pharrell explains that you’re going to be up all night, though you already knew that. The song creates the feeling of being on a tugboat made of bubbles while Nile Rodgers serves you liquid Valium in flute glasses and Pharrell Williams gives vague but really helpful advice. Since the service made “Get Lucky” available, on April 18th, it has been streamed more than forty million times around the world. The world may hit that number, if we come together as one: “Get Lucky” had the biggest streaming day for a single track in the history of Spotify for the United States and U.K., and had the biggest first day in Spotify history. You can play the single “Get Lucky” eight billion times without tiring of it. I might have pointed out a few things, though. Would I have changed the tone of my review, though, if I had been able to hear the album ten or twenty times before writing (which is my preference)? Probably not. One can imagine several military specialists having worked on expanding its sonic range. The album has been engineered and produced so that, wherever you play it, it sounds like money was spent on every bit of it. The column made it clear that I was of several minds about “Random Access Memories,” but hearing it in my home confirmed there was no special sauce in Metal Mike’s tool kit. (Don’t worry about the terms-it’s a format that sounds about as good as digital audio can.) I held a high-decibel audition at home and found that none of the detail was missing. By the time we had closed the column on Wednesday, May 15th, five whole days before the column was posted online and appeared in print, I found a 24/96 FLAC rip of the vinyl version of the album on the Web. Weeks later, as The New Yorker’ s editors and checkers were closing the piece, the label provided an MP3 version of the album to the magazine others versions had begun circulating online. (Weirdly, like all Daft Punk albums, this one features no female voices, almost no female musicians, and an almost complete lack of any references to work by women, other than as anonymous partners.) The music was loud, and the sound was gloriously tactile. On March 26th, in a large conference room at the Sony Building on Madison Avenue, a well-liked man known as Metal Mike lifted a box out of a Zero Halliburton suitcase, plugged it into a stereo that we couldn’t see, and played “Random Access Memories” for about ten journalists through speakers we could definitely see. Before I wrote a column on the album, I heard “Random Access Memories” all the way through only once.
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