For everyone commenting that they want more songs without drums, https://www.lalal.ai/ is a great tool for splitting stems (vocals solo, drums solo) - software like this is how modern DJ's remix big songs so quivkly without onerous bargaining with labels for stems. Enjoy!!!
Muting the percussion on a track allows the melodies to be more easily sampled in other songs and mixes. I imagine that this is a way to help their music be plugged into future songs.
RAM stems are already out there ... I think the drumless release, especially on vinyl, is more useful for DJs who want to mix in samples "live" in the room to a dancing crowd. RAM is all about marrying a Disco and DJ aesthetic with the best of everything Dance that happened between the 70s and the 2010s. Daft Punk even switched out specific period microphones for different parts of recording. Encouraging old-school vinyl scratch mixing is right in the wheelhouse.
I suspect they Daft Punk also enjoy how deep the pocket groove on the work is. When you have Nile Rodgers and Nathan East playing on tracks it's just incredible. And because they recorded to Omar Hakim's drums originally, his groove sticks even when you can't hear him. I hope he still gets credit!
If this is why… why not just release all the individual layers?
I’ve always wondered how remixes come to be. Some sound muddy and obviously full of muted layers. But others sound like they had access to the individual tracks.
"All the individual layers" are called "stems" and artists that want to explicitly encourage remixes of their work will release stems. (Of course, you still pay royalties if you use them.)
You can also create your own stems, typically of usable but not perfect quality, using AI track separation software like demucs. ("Demux," get it?) I've used them to censor a track, or to isolate just percussion and piano, for example.
Royalties aside, in this Creative Commons, remix/mashup heavy inline world, why aren’t bass releasing multi tracks? A decade ago remix.nin.com provided multitracks and Garage Band and Ableton projects to remix and upload. Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D and Ghosts had the same on CD-ROM (Ghosts was Creative Commons which led to 34 Ghosts IV being sampled and later included in Old Town Road). The Slip stems were released publicly under CC as well. People went further and pulled tracks from Rock Band.
Are there other big bands that have done this? While not getting down to raw assets, home movies have had special features describing filmmaking techniques since the 80s. I’d guess at least 10% of current home video releases come with some type of commentary, featurette, or the like. Why is this so much less common in the music industry?
It's a common thing in the electronic music industry to release stems as a part of a remix contest. Dozens of remixes get uploaded to Soundcloud, the authors of the original track cherrypick a couple of them, package them into a "(Remixes)" EP and release it on their label.
It's like an initiation step for bedroom producers. You build up your reputation by having a couple of remixes released by an actual label, your remix gets played by DJs associated with that label, you start to develop relationships with the industry people in the process... It's an entire ecosystem based around free stems.
This on the other hand is aimed at DJs who use vinyls to layer on top of different drums, but it's the same principle. They want their tracks to be sampleable to other artists.
Some artists do. Moby used to do this. You can see it on this old CD single where he included a track with all the "parts" on it which was just the individual samples:
I listened to the single track they've released so far (it's up on Apple Music) and it's very pleasant to listen to - kind of like when a band releases an acoustic version of one of their tracks.
I like to make notification sounds and ringtones from short melodies in songs I like. For instance I had Green Day's Brain Stew as my on-call ringtone :)
If more stems (I learned a new word!) are made available then I can make cleaner sounds. Very cool stuff!
It's for DJs. Daft Punk is House music, and powerful drums are an defining part of the whole genre...which is also heavily based on sampling and remixing. A live DJ can easily pair this with another song, or their own percussion/instrumental tracks, since it doesn't have any to clash with them.
Stem files are a common way to do this nowadays, but the original roots of the House genre were people sampling disco a capellas onto sampling keyboards and playing them with their own music, using TR-909 drums, keyboards like the notorious Korg M1, etc.
I don’t think “prefers” is the right framing, insofar as I don’t know of anyone who prefers writing in an esoteric language for everyday purposes. But it’s an interesting deconstruction of some familiar music.
You can enjoy song covers just as much as the original song, the same way having drumless songs isn't a statement against the original "drumful" release.
Others said it already, it serves well for other artists to easily sample and remix the songs.
