Kanye West Earns His First Diamond Record With A Little Help From Daft Punk

Fourteen years after its initial release, Kanye West’s “Stronger” finally goes diamond with 10 million equivalent sales.

The song was released on West’s 2004 album Graduation and famously samples Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.”

Writes HipHopDX, “The genre-blending tune was a labor of love for Kanye West and his team as the track was mixed over 75 times and had more than 10 engineers working on perfecting the record — until Timbaland came in at the last minute to make the ‘drums pop.'”

“When [Kanye] sampled Daft Punk on an ASR-10, Plain Pat said, ‘You can’t flip this. It’s not going to work.’ Pat was highly skeptical,” said Anthony Kilhoffersaid, one of Kanye’s go-to engineers. “At the end of the day, he cooked up ‘Stronger’ in five minutes, and it was quite a departure from the boom-bap Kanye West production, and the beginning of experimenting with other albums.

Kanye West’s ‘Stronger’ is now @RIAA certified DIAMOND ! Congratulations to Yeezy and the entire team. pic.twitter.com/ISgiWiF52b

— Def Jam Recordings (@defjam) October 6, 2021