Daft Punk Tron Legacy Soundtrack Now Streaming (Barely)

Daft Punk’s music for the “Tron: Legacy” soundtrack has made masterful use of the new art of the musical trailer.

We’re calling a new meme. Earlier this spring Arcade Fire caught our attention when they released a “trailer” for the lead single from their new record, “The Suburbs.” The instant news broke that they were streaming material from the new record, we ran to their website and were dumbfounded to hear a :30″ snippet on a loop.

“What the hell are they doing?” we asked each other. A trailer? For a song? It was the first time we’d remembered a bona fide trailer being released for a song, and we speculated about how this was the logical next step in a world with ever-shrinking attention spans. We used to listen to albums, and the album’s teaser was an early-release single. Now that our attention spans are shorter and we think in terms of songs rather than albums, the teaser has become a :30″ snippet of the song.

In Arcade Fire’s case, it didn’t really work. For all their innovation and that incredible interactive video, Arcade Fire is a twentieth century band in spirit. Their songs don’t translate to bytes.

Daft Punk, on the other hand, may just be the definitive twenty-first century band, and not just because of the futuristic suits. Their songs are post-modern, disillusioned apropos of nothing, and perfectly redacted into bytes. I love listening to “Human After All” all the way through, but a :15″ clip of “Robot Rock” is also perfectly satisfying in and of itself. In fact, Daft Punk may even be Advanced—I’ll have to ask D+T contributor and creator of Advancement Theory about that.

So it makes sense that the 1:40 clip from the “Tron: Legacy” soundtrack is perfectly satisfying. Earlier snippets Daft Punk’s “Tron: Legacy” soundtrack were leaked this summer, but were much shorter. As Pitchfork aptly described this new snippet, listening to it on your way out the door is guaranteed to make you feel like a superhero.

Head to Tron Legacy’s Facebook Fan page to listen to the new Daft Punk offering.

So what do you think? Is the musical trailer meme here to stay? Before Radiohead‘s next album will we get a barrage of :20″ sound clips to make sense of? And will they actually get us psyched for the record, or just leave us scratching our heads? Let us know what you think!