Play (Moby Album) - Unexpected Success

Unexpected Success

First sales of the Play album were poor. In the UK, it debuted at number 33 on the UK Albums Chart on May 29, 1999, but during the rest of the year only spent five further weeks inside the charts. It was on January 15, 2000 that the album re-entered the UK charts, slowly climbing positions and finally reaching number 1 three months later. According to Moby, "almost a year after it came out in 2000 I was opening up for Bush on an MTV Campus Invasion Tour. It was degrading for the most part. Their audience had less than no interest in me. February in 2000, I was in Minnesota, I was depressed and my manager called me to tell me that Play was #1 in the UK, and had beat out Santana's Supernatural. I was like, 'But the record came out 10 months ago.' That's when I knew, all of a sudden, that things were different. Then it was #1 in France, in Australia, in Germany—it just kept piling on. The week Play was released, it sold, worldwide around 6,000 copies. Eleven months after Play was released, it was selling 150,000 copies a week. I was on tour constantly, drunk pretty much the entire time and it was just a blur. And then all of a sudden movie stars started coming to my concerts and I started getting invited to fancy parties and suddenly the journalists who wouldn't return my publicist's calls were talking about doing cover stories. It was a really odd phenomenon."

Play has sold over 12 million copies worldwide. Despite only reaching number 38 in the United States Billboard 200, over two million were sold there, with the album enjoying steady sales for months and constant popularity. In the UK, Play reached number 1 on April 15, 2000 (spending five weeks at the top) in the wake of the success of the "Natural Blues" single. It remained high in the charts during the rest of the year, particularly supported by the huge success of its successors, "Porcelain" and "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?". Spending almost the entire year 2000 in the charts, and achieving a total of 81 weeks overall the lists, it became the fifth best-selling album of 2000 in the UK.

Play found its major strengths on the support of its impressive string of nine hit singles, an unprecedented feat for an electronica album. Seven of those singles were UK Top 40 hits - "Honey", the first single, was already in the market in August 1998, nearly ten months before the release of the actual album. The final single choice was "Find My Baby", which appeared on some national charts three and a half years after. One of the most notable aspects of the singles releases is that some of the strongest titles were released late ("Porcelain", for example, was the sixth single from the album, released over a year after Play), on the way of securing a steady presence of the album in the charts.

The apparent result of the marketing strategy was that the album, after an unremarkable debut, stayed on the charts for several years and broke sales projections for Moby and for the dance music scene, which was not seen to be a dominant commercial genre in the US in the 1990s (as compared with in Europe, where Moby had initially found fame). Overall, then, in many ways this album helped to establish Moby as a mainstream musician. His later albums have been more downtempo-oriented, frequently featuring his own distinctive singing, often with female vocalists and samples similar to those on Play, as opposed to his earlier more club- or alternative-oriented records where he rarely sang.