Daft Punk 'Random Access Memories,' New Album 2013 Breaks Spotify & Sales Records
Electronic band Daft Punk's new album Random Access Memories is breaking sales and streaming records all around the world.
Daft Punk's Random Access Memories was released on May 21. It has sold 165,000 copies in the United Kingdom, making it the biggest first week sales this year. They outsold previous record-holder Michael Buble's To Be Loved, which sold 121,000 copies.
Early projections for the United States are in the 300,000 copies range, easily becoming the No. 1 album of the week on the Billboard 200 chart. It would be the most copies sold since this year's Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience, which sold 968,000 copies.
In addition to these sales, music streaming service Spotify announced Monday that Daft Punk officially has the biggest number of streams in its first week in the U.S. of all time. Though they would not release the exact number, the band was able to beat Mumford & Sons for Babel, which had eight million streams in the first week.
Daft Punk is reaping the benefits from waiting eight years to release a new album. Timberlake had a similar strategy, waiting seven years to release a new album, and the experiment paid off.
In its first week, Random Access Memories will have sold more copies than their last album Human After All has sold to date. Human After All was released in 2005 and has only sold 125,000 according to Nielsen SoundScan
The band came out with their first new single, Get Lucky featuring Pharrell Williams, in April. The song is in the No. 10 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, making it the band's first top 10 hit.
Random Access Memories has received near universal acclaim from music critics, with review aggregator Metacritic citing many perfect 100 scores.
"It is the boldest, smartest, most colourful and purely pleasurable dance album of this decade," said The Telegraph.
The album is in stores and can be downloaded on iTunes or streamed on Spotify.
