Nobody figured Moby for a million-selling artist on June 1, 1999, when his album “Play” was released to little fanfare. A year later, he still doesn’t have a hit single or video, but he does have a platinum album.
Through a unique array of circumstances–the exposure afforded by a 30-second movie trailer, a department store ad on television, a phone call from Madonna, a thumb’s up from David Letterman, the “have-you-heard-this-album?” word-of-mouth generated by everyone from record-store clerks to Elton John–Moby became not just one of the most respected artists of the last year but also one of the most successful.
Like many great albums that defy category, “Play” threatened to slip unnoticed beneath the pop-culture radar when commercial radio and MTV took a pass on it last summer. But Moby’s music got new life when it was embraced by TV producers, moviemakers and ad executives.
“The advertising world, the fashion world, the film and television world–those were the first people to jump on this,” says Kate Hyman, the talent scout who signed Moby to V2 Records last year. “If we had only turned to radio with this record, it would have been over a long time ago.”
How “Play” became a success is telling, Hyman says: “It should be a slap in the face to our industry.” For Moby and the people who have come to love his music, the triumph of “Play” is only sweetened by how unlikely it seemed.
“Everything above 150,000 sales of this album has been a real bonus,” Moby says. His best-selling album previously, “Everything is Wrong” (1995), had topped out at that figure. “When I made this record, I thought selling that many copies would be phenomenal.”
Now it looks as though “Play” will sell 10 times that number by year’s end.
A few days ago, while Moby was awaiting a show in Holland, he was told by one of his managers, Barry Taylor, that “Play” had reached the million mark in North American sales, nearly a year to the day of its release. In addition, the album has sold 2 million copies in the rest of the world.
“Moby was ecstatic,” Taylor says of their brief conversation. “But he didn’t have much time to talk. He had to get back to making music.”
Though the music often seems secondary to a record’s success in these image-conscious times, the music was crucial in Moby’s ascent to platinum. It began when a song called “Honey” shattered the hum of the mundane on a radio station in Woodstock, N.Y., and a listener driving home from work in Manhattan was so moved that she pulled her car off the road and called the deejay.
Who the heck was that? she asked.
The caller was V2’s Hyman, and the answer to her question was Moby, who at that precise moment in the winter of 1999 had no record label. “Honey” was put out as a single in Europe, where Moby had built the bulk of his following in the last decade as one of the architects of contemporary electronic music.
“I was not a scholar of electronic music, nor particularly a fan,” Hyman says. “If it had been a techno record, I wouldn’t have been interested. This had elements of that, but it also had blues and gospel. It was music for people who might have shied away from some current dance music because of its coldness. This was different. I didn’t know how to categorize it exactly. I only knew it made me pull over and pick up a phone.”
When Hyman heard the other tracks on “Play,” the album Moby had made in his home studio, she was determined to sign him. Using vocals by obscure postwar gospel groups such as Bill Landford & the Landfordaires and spirituals culled from field recordings by Alan Lomax, Moby had constructed a richly textured, postmodern soul album. Playing all the instruments himself, Moby connected the unfettered passion of pre-rock blues and gospel to the joyous bounce and edgy rhythms of late ’90s hip-hop and techno. He touched on the ecstatic spirituality of Arvo Part, the heart-breaking romanticism of artists ranging from Cole Porter to Bryan Ferry. Though it was strictly coincidental that “Play” was released at the end of the century, it seemed to celebrate the last 100 years of music, drawing connections across time and spanning cultures with a grace that few albums have ever achieved. The album didn’t scream “hit.” It whispered “beauty.”
When V2 released “Play,” it had modest expectations. Moby was not exactly an unproven artist; for a time he was the enfant terrible of techno, scoring club hits such as “Go,” in which he brought unusual warmth and groove to the world of machine beats and synthetic texture. He won acclaim for “Everything is Wrong” (1995), but a subsequent release, “Animal Rights” (1997), sold only about 50,000 copies, and he was released from his contract with Elektra Records.
V2 strategists expected that Moby would regain most of his mid-’90s following, but prospects for significant sales beyond his core audience of 150,000 were not considered especially bright. Without radio or MTV support, most records released in the last decade have sunk into obscurity, and Moby had a reputation for making records that clashed with prevailing trends.
Predictably, MTV and radio weren’t eager to embrace “Play.”
“I was not fanatical about this record for a long time,” says Dave Richards, program director at Chicago’s WKQX-FM 101.1, one of the country’s most influential modern rock stations. “But the best records are often the ones that take a long time to build, because it suggests there is nothing out there like them, and that was definitely the case with this one.”
“With MTV,” says Rachel Mintz, V2 product manager, “you have to look like a rock star. You have to have people dancing. Moby did a video for us [for `Natural Blues’] looking like an old man being wheeled down the hallway of a very depressing old-age home. It’s a beautiful video, like a work of art. But with the MTV audience, you have to appeal to the basic senses.”
Yet there were rumblings from the start that “Play” was appealing to the basic senses in other ways. Critics arrived at an early consensus that “Play” was one of the year’s most important albums, the acclaim nearly as overwhelming as that which greeted the release of “Nevermind” by an unheralded band called Nirvana a decade ago.
Then, Elton John bought 50 copies of “Play” from V2 to give to friends. Letterman invited Moby on his talk show three times and requested specific songs. And, last fall, Madonna called.
“One of the guys who worked for us was having a coronary as he was trying to tell us Madonna was on the phone wanting to speak to Moby,” says co-manager Marci Webber. “She asked us if there was a song she could work on with Moby,” but he was on tour. So she ended up licensing Moby’s “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad” for her movie “The Next Best Thing.”
Steady sales of 10,000-plus copies a week of “Play” were sustained for months. “The record was in our top five since it was released,” says Joe Kvidra, general manager at Tower Records on Clark Street. Kvidra and V2’s Mintz report that Moby’s fan base has expanded to older listeners who are exposed to records more slowly.
“It was a word-of-mouth thing, and then people started hearing the music on TV commercials and movie trailers,” Kvidra says. “We had people come in the store asking for the `Nordstrom’s song.”‘
“Porcelain,” one of the most haunting tracks on “Play,” was the instrumental backdrop in a television ad for Nordstrom’s department store. The song was also prominently featured in a frequently aired trailer for the movie “The Beach” and wafted through the TV shows “Third Watch,” “Party of Five” and “Jack & Jill.” Radio and MTV may not have been pressing “Play,” but the movie and advertising worlds were. “Porcelain” was one of 11 “Play” tracks to appear in movies, TV shows or commercials.
For Moby, promoting his music through advertisements once would have been unthinkable.
“The first time I was ever approached to have my music used in a commercial was [in 1995] for a Range Rover ad in Europe, and my knee-jerk punk-rock reaction was `No! Absolutely not!”‘ says Moby. “I don’t have a big problem with cars, but I think the petrochemical complex is a nasty thing. In a perfect world, the music I make wouldn’t be used to advertise cars. And then I realized that they’re still going to make the commercial even if I say no, so my solution was to take the money [almost $200,000] and give it to environmental organizations.”
Since then, Moby has fielded a steady stream of licensing offers for his evocative music from advertisers and movie representatives, few of which he has turned down. And he’s no longer handing the money over to charity. He owns a home and a recording studio in Manhattan.
“When I was younger, I saw the world in rigid black-and-white terms,” he says. “I was quite a moralist. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to realize how complex the world is, especially the consumer-driven, media-saturated world in which we live, and I like living in it. It’s not all bad, and it’s not all good. It is a fascinating process, and it exposes more people to my music. I sleep well at night because the music itself is never compromised. I made these songs because I love them, and I never thought, How would this sound on radio? let alone a TV ad. The moment when I actually compromise my creative output to make it more commercially palatable, that’s when I’ll feel disgusted with myself. But for now, I’ve maintained my artistic integrity while approaching the dissemination of my creative output in a slightly unorthodox way.”
If there’s a sad undercurrent to the Moby success story, it is in affirming that the advertising world has become in many ways more adventurous than radio in experimenting with music that falls outside the format boundaries. In recent months TV commercials have broken the music of techno artists such as Fatboy Slim and the late folk singer Nick Drake. Now it’s Moby turn and the multimedia exposure just keeps growing.
After appearing in a series of print ads for a jeans manufacturer, he just enjoyed his best sales week yet, moving nearly 30,000 copies of “Play.” Radio and MTV have both hopped aboard the Moby bandwagon with a vengeance and there are plans to release at least one and possibly two more singles from the album before year’s end. Some of Moby’s confidants are actually becoming concerned that the artist is in danger of becoming over-exposed. “It’s a nice problem to have,” Webber says. “And totally unexpected.”
The artist, a thoughtful and humble man of 34, is already working on his next album, which he says will be different than “Play.”
“At the end of the day the one thing I find more profoundly satisfying than anything else is working on my own music,” he says. Though thrilled by his breakthrough, he shrugs off its significance.
“If you look at the history of popular music, there is a grand tradition of marginal, outsider artists becoming part of the mainstream: Madonna, Prince and Bruce Springsteen were once all like that,” he says. “Most of the records I fell in love with were like that. But, at the same time, a lot of wonderful records get made each year that are totally ignored. With this record, I was trying to make something that I loved. I didn’t expect many people to be exposed to it. That so many have has been a pleasant surprise.”
