The Daily Swarm

Thomas Bangalter:

Yeah, but what’s happening in the record industry right now, the self-destruction of it, and all the changes, both with the technology and the economy, maybe artists are going to be seen as bringing creative content that is not so much linked to record sales. And that’s what we’ve really felt. We’ve sold a lot of records in the past, but it seems that now the people that are interested in music or an artist are not—thanks to the internet and the different means of discovering music—so much focused on who’s on the charts or who’s on the radio or who’s on TV, but rather who makes something interesting or exciting, and how can I experience it, and how can I have access to it quite easily and fast. So it’s true that while in the past a lot of what we were doing—being robots, doing weird music videos, things like that – people could think that it was marketing for selling the music. But I think more and more people understood or realized that it was not really so much a marketing approach than a general creative approach. We’ve just been trying to do cool stuff and interesting stuff in every creative domain, with every art form we could use. And that’s what I think maybe people are validating through the excitement they bring, which is not linked to the economy of the music industry. Because that’s not viable anymore, in a way.