Stardust comprised the Daft Punk member Thomas Bangalter, the DJ Alan Braxe, and the vocalist Benjamin Diamond.
Stardust formed for a performance at the Rex Club in Paris, and wrote "Music Sounds Better with You" using a guitar riff sampled from the 1981 Chaka Khan song "Fate".
In France, the DJ Alan Braxe and the singer Benjamin Diamond met in boarding school and bonded over music as teenagers.
[4][2] He met Thomas Bangalter, a member of the electronic duo Daft Punk, in a nightclub, and later gave him a demo of his track "Vertigo".
[3] After the release of "Vertigo", Braxe performed at the Rex Club in Paris, with Bangalter on keyboards and Diamond on vocals.
[a] He left the band when they expressed contempt for his collaboration with electronic musicians, telling him to "go back to see your Daft Punk friends and forget us".
[2] After the Rex Club performance, Stardust worked on "Music Sounds Better With You" at Bangalter's home studio, Daft House, for six days.
[9][10] They arranged it using a Rhodes piano, a Roland TR-909 drum machine, a bassline recorded on a Korg Trident, and an Ensoniq ASR-10 sampling keyboard, triggering different sections by assigning them to different keys.
The single was intended for DJs, but demand grew after copies were distributed at the 1998 Miami Winter Music Conference.
[13] Bangalter did not enjoy the pressure and attention that the success of "Music Sound Better with You" brought, as he had intended Roulé as a hobby and creative platform.
In the video, a young boy constructs a model glider over several days while the members of Stardust perform on television, with Bangalter and Braxe wearing metallic masks and Diamond's face painted silver.
[25] The Insomniac journalist Jonny Coleman wrote that it "helps reinforce the notion that this whole Stardust concept is supposed to exist in some other familiar but foreign liminal space, something ghostly but still warm and inviting".
[27] Larry Flick of Billboard described it as a "euro-splashed ditty" with "an infectious li'l hook and a solid, old-school disco bassline ... its execution makes it pop with a refreshing energy".
[30] In Pitchfork, Andy Battaglia wrote that "Music Sounds Better with You" demonstrated the similarities between disco and Daft Punk.
"[25] Vice's Josh Baines called it the "absolute papa of French touch ... one of the most genuinely transcendental records ever committed to wax".
[32] The BBC described it as "four minutes of French funk built upon a brutally efficient four-bar loop that became the signature sound of summer 1998".
[46] According to Billboard, after the success of "Music Sounds Better with You", Virgin offered Bangalter $3 million to produce a Stardust album.
A performance was included on the bonus disc of the live album Alive 2007, which Pitchfork described as "a combination so 'holy shit' ecstatic it would seem downright cocky if it wasn't so blissful".
[53] It was used in the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V,[54] and was covered that year in a live show by the xx and Jessie Ware mashed-up with Modjo's "Lady".