It started with a Facebook post: Two helmets, one gold and one silver, halved and fused down the center, set against plain black. Then came the 15-second ad, aired during the March 2 episode of “Saturday Night Live”; its first appearance online was through an excited fan’s YouTube video of his TV screen.  With each viral salvo, it was clear all bets were off: reclusive electronic music icons Daft Punk were releasing a new album — eventually revealed as Random Access Memories — and nothing about how it came to be would prove traditional, in the process unleashing one of the most tactical and innovative marketing campaigns in music business history.

With the album finally being released this Tuesday, May 21, .Biz has painstakingly crafted the following timeline/oral history outlining how, step by step, key players — including Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, Columbia chairman/CEO Rob Stringer, Columbia senior VP of marketing Scott Greer, band manager Paul Hahn, and publicist and Biz3 owner Kathryn Frazier — worked together on this groundbreaking campaign that has transformed Daft Punk’s fourth studio LP into 2013’s most undeniable pop-culture moment thus far.

October 28, 2008
Daft Punk themselves first tantalize that a new release is on the horizon in a 2008 interview. “Right now we are making music in Paris,” de Homem-Christo told Stop Smiling magazine. “We are free of all our record contracts, so any direction is possible.” The seeds for what would become Random Access Memories’ marketing strategy seemed already planted in the duo’s minds. “The development of a subculture of uncontrolled gatherings is interesting to us,” Bangalter said. “We like to play with old memories and different ideas and influences. Combining them produces something different and surreal, where you can’t really recall where you’ve seen this combination before. We live to play with clichés and to destroy or change the parameters.”