15 years ago, Daft Punk’s Coachella set helped spark an “arms race” for live music technology

At 11 PM PST on Saturday, April 29, 2006, fans pooled in front of the Sahara Tent at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Southern California. Known as the festival’s main EDM hub, the Sahara Tent was designed to fit a maximum of 10,000 people. But on that night, it would ultimately play host to an audience of over 40,000 — all waiting for French electronic duo Daft Punk.

Comprised of Thomas Bangalater and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, the masked producers were best known at the time for their album Discovery (2001), featuring crossover hits like the party-friendly “One More Time” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” which would become the bedrock sample for Kanye West’s Billboard #1 hit “Stronger” (2007). The duo’s 2006 Coachella performance — their first U.S. performance in nearly a decade — was also the first time they performed Discovery live, along with tracks from their more recent effort, Human After All (2005).

Little did spectators know that the legacy of this performance would continue to reverberate throughout the music and tech industries today, 15 years later.

Opening with their song “Robot Rock,” Daft Punk emerged from the darkness, donning custom metallic helmets and standing atop a staggering pyramid of light projections and LEDs. Designed by Martin Phillips and inspired by Daft Punk’s music video for “Technologic” (which Phillips had also designed), the stage quickly became as mythological in pop culture history as the masked duo themselves — and flipped the accepted notions of electronic music performance on its head.

Their live sets weren’t always this way. Their first U.S. performance — which took place in 1996 in the middle of a Wisconsin field, as part of the grassroots Even Further Festival — had followed the script of a humble Detroit or Chicago set, without any of the bells and whistles audiences would later come to expect.

“Going back to Detroit and Chicago in the early days, electronic acts did not want to be emphasized. It was more of creating the environment for dancing,” remembers Alex Prince, production coordinator for Tyler, The Creator and tour manager for A$AP Ferg, Kali Uchis and more. “It’s a pretty new phenomenon to have electronic artists front and center, creating spectacles that draw attention.”

But in the following years, as their prominence and creative vision grew, Daft Punk became known as trailblazers for electronic music in the mainstream consciousness. At the turn of the 21st century, their creative output became highly futuristic and cinematic: They not only donned their now-famous metallic helmets for the first time, but they also released a string of music videos in collaboration with directors like Spike Jonze (“Da Funk”) and Roman Coppola (“Revolution 909”). In 2003, they followed up with the even more ambitious, hour-long sci-fi anime film Interstella 5555, which served as a visual accompaniment to Discovery and was produced by Toei Animation, the studio behind Sailor Moon, Digimon, One Piece and many other beloved anime series.

Their 2006 Coachella set in particular helped redefine the possibilities for live music performance — cementing Coachella as the premiere destination for live music spectaculars, and spurning what Brendan Hoffman, Head of Touring for TMWRK Management, calls an “arms race to get the latest and greatest technology” for shows across genres.

The technology behind Daft Punk’s Coachella set

Despite the mystique that Daft Punk’s 2006 pyramidal stage holds, designer Martin Phillips explains that there were not actually any new or bespoke products invented for that particular set.

“What was new was the fact that [they] had taken the existing products and used them as building blocks for something much bigger,” says Phillips. In fact, all the LED panels, Versa Tubes and pixel curtains used to decorate the stage were bought straight “off the shelf.”

For the focal point of the design, Phillips constructed a towering LED pyramid using a series of OLite panels from European manufacturer Barco, one of only a few companies dedicated to LED technology at the time. The separate LED sheets were placed side-by-side into a metal, triangular frame and mapped to work together in tandem to present words, images and designs on its massive surface. “We were building this on the cusp of the shift in lighting technology [from incandescents] to LEDs,” says Phillips, which made mapping on such a grand scale a formidable task.

The crew also mapped to VersaTubes — seen in the header photo above as the lattice of triangles framing the pyramid — and pixel curtains, or nets of interconnected LED lights that can be hung like a sheet (or curtain) on stage. Both technologies were created by Element Labs, which was later acquired by Barco in 2010.

On top of these already ambitious plans, Daft Punk was adamant about improvising their entire set through Ableton Live, which allows musicians to easily store and trigger samples and to sequence their sets on the go. Daft Punk gave Phillips and his team a skeletal outline of how their set would play out, but the duo then proceeded to freestyle everything else – creating mashups like “Around The World / Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” and “Touch It / Technologic” that are now legendary among diehard fans.

Though this technology had been readily adopted by electronic acts by the time of Daft Punk’s Coachella set, no one had yet used Ableton Live on this scale, ad-libbing audio and multi-layered LED displays concurrently. “Having MIDI triggering directly to lights has come a long way since then, but at the time, it was really a case of a guy on the [sound] console trying to keep up,” says Phillips.

Their Coachella set was so successful that Daft Punk would bring the same spectacular pyramid and improvisational mechanics on their international tour Alive 2006/2007, which would be their final tour as a duo.

Live music becomes a spectacle — but at what cost?

In the wake of Daft Punk’s 2006 Coachella set, visual spectacle is now table stakes for today’s biggest electronic acts. Technologies like LED screens and video mapping systems like ArKaos are now the industry standard, not the exception, for live shows; electronic artists also regularly build their own larger-than-live stage centerpieces, like ZHU’s video-mapped pyramids, The Chainsmokers’ Globe of Death and Eric Prydz’s Holosphere.

“Now, it’s so much more than just going to listen to your favorite artists,” says Prince. “It’s about, ‘What’s the best show you’ve ever seen?’”

After 2006, Coachella in particular quickly built a reputation as one of the first and largest stages for artists and brands to pilot emerging technologies — from Snoop Dogg performing with one of the earliest concert-ready holograms of the late rapper Tupac Shakur back in 2012, to over 400 synchronized drones forming Odesza’s logo in the sky in 2018, powered by Intel’s Shooting Star system.

“I think a lot of the lighting and video companies owe Coachella a huge thank-you for bringing attention to their part of the industry,” says Hoffman. “Since that Daft Punk set, those industries have grown out exponentially. Coachella is now a showcase not just for artists, but for the technology they bring as well.”

Although Daft Punk’s set may have acted as an impetus for innovation, there are certainly downsides to the creation of a live music “arms race.”

For one, it’s cost-prohibitive for the majority of artists. According to Intel’s public pricing guide, a show with 100 of their drones amounts to about $50,000, which is comparable to what other drone manufacturers like the Philadelphia-based company Verge Aero offer. A hologram, like that of Tupac Shakur, is estimated to cost between $100,000 to $400,000 to develop. This cutting-edge technology is far out of reach for emerging acts, and its use has arguably deepened the chasm between what a small- to mid- level artist can offer on stage versus what a major artist can.

In fact, many artists finance stage designs outside of their budgets just to stay competitive. The Weeknd notably sank over $7 million out-of-pocket into building his Super Bowl halftime show set — for which, like all headliners before him, he wasn’t paid a dime. That said, this investment and exposure may have paid off for him, since the show led to a 385% increase in his music sales the following day.

Daft Punk’s Coachella set itself was also the product of self-investment from the artist. Taking some of their advance money and placing it into the production of the Coachella set, the duo forfeited some of their rightfully earned profits to enhance the fan experience. Daft Punk was luckily in a comfortable enough financial position and was able to take this cut, but for many artists, self-financing just makes it more unlikely to turn a profit or recoup expenses.

Sean Nye, an assistant professor of practice in musicology at University of Southern California who focuses on electronic music and pop culture, warns that too much focus on the set design can also be detrimental to the music itself. “Sometimes when music becomes the soundtrack to a firework show, or any show where you’re focused on the visuals, the artist may not necessarily continue to innovate in terms of music,” suggests Nye.

Even Phillips agrees that set design can become cumbersome to a concert, sharing an old adage among sound mix engineers: “You don’t go home humming the lights!”

To Phillips, the stage should act merely as a complement to the music. “If you feel that you need to be a part of this arms race, I think you’re missing the point,” he says. “Some of my favorite shows have been small club shows. The point is doing what is most clever.”

This is exactly what made Daft Punk’s 2006 set so influential. It wasn’t just about keeping audiences’ eyes glued to the stage with flashing lights and spectacle; it was also about engaging audiences’ ears, and remixing a whole new musical experience in real time. In fact, the live mixing from Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 tour, which built off their Coachella performance, would go on to earn the duo a Grammy Award for Best Electronic/Dance Album — one of the only live albums to win this accomplishment.

Indeed, when asked what he thought made Daft Punk’s Coachella set such an iconic moment in live music even fifteen years later, Phillips humbly responds: “It was because of the music. The majority of the magic of it is just what they did musically. So much of it was lightning in a bottle.”