> DAFT PUNK™

I quite like Daft Punk but that ™ makes them uncool very quickly. Immediately makes me assume it's just a brand name now, run by an agency, music work outsourced to freelance ghost composers, and so on. Like Philips TVs and "Jamie Oliver" cookware.

I'm so juiced to buy this. I went to Alive 2007 at Coney Island, which was a surprisingly intimate venue for the show (if this is your thing, go watch it if you haven't - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmR4zLcORNc), and it remains one of the more remarkable musical experiences I've had. One, it was pre-phone saturation, so the crowd was engaged and the experience was novel. Two, it was astoundingly unique at the time; the production values and concept were just so far forward. For those of you who are younger, it's a little hard to explain, but for me there is "before Alive" and "after Alive" in terms of larger scale electronic music performances. It's sort of like seeing the beginning of a new evolutionary tree. Then of course it becomes really interesting that Random Access Memories really was a fundamental rejection of the beast they'd helped generate. I thought it was super interesting that Bangalter did Ally Pally with Fred Again recently... he seems, along with a newer generation of DJs (Barry Can't Swim is another), to have gotten the message... took a while.

Edit: when I say the experience was novel, I mean I had only heard the faintest of news that I was going to this amazing show. I had no prior visual information on what to expect -

RAM Drumless Edition, the Fortnite stunt, now this... It's sad to see Daft Punk™ trying to get every last dime out of that brand name, even after splitting up. They used to reinvest a lot of their early profits into new music, videos, etc., but now it just seems like a sad cash grab. Hope they got some good real estate on the French Riviera out of it at least, it leaves a bad taste on their whole catalogue to me.

Once upon a time kids had train sets, however, other toys such as LEGO came along and train sets fell out of fashion. However, in time, the boomers that did have train sets retired and some of them built the train sets that their nine year old former selves could only dream of. The toy for kids became a hobby for retirees.

I wonder if LEGO is going to follow the same fate, to no longer be of interest to Roblox and Minecraft obsessed kids, to develop an increasingly elderly customer base, ending up with just retirees.

Daft Punk became a household name in the late 1990s, placing their core audience as Gen X, which is reasonably elderly, and well on the way for the kids to retirees pipeline. Expect LEGO to be grand-pa only in a couple of decades.

What remains of the train set business makes a token effort to appeal to kids, all of it is priced out of their league and not marketed to them in ways of yesteryear. Instead it is all about limited edition, very expensive and highly accurate models that get sold to a diminishing customer base, necessitating ever higher prices and further consolidation in the industry.

Imaginably, LEGO in twenty years time will be like this, making nothing but a token effort to sell to kids yet making money with expensive and even more elaborate reissues of models such as this one.

Hopefully this won't be the future of LEGO, however, they do need this adult market given how kids don't play with toys now they have tablets.

should not be on HN

Anything is infinitely more cute and beautiful when its LEGO :))))))))