Hotel is the seventh studio album by American electronica musician, singer, songwriter, and producer Moby. It was released on March 14, 2005, internationally by Mute Records and on March 22, 2005, in the United States by V2 Records. The album marked a stylistic shift from electronic and dance-oriented music towards alternative rock and Moby's decision not to use vocal sampling for the first time since his 1993 album Ambient. Hotel was met with a mixed critical reception upon release but was a commercial success, reaching No. 28 in the US and No. 8 in the UK. Elsewhere, it reached No. 1 in Belgium and Switzerland. Initial quantities of the album included a second CD of ambient music entitled Hotel: Ambient. By 2013, the album had sold over 2 million copies worldwide. In 2014, Hotel: Ambient was released with additional tracks. Background and writing After touring for his previous album, 18 (2002), ended in 2003, Moby took a detour in musical styles and released Baby Monkey, the third album under his Voodoo Child pseudonym, in January 2004. It marked a return to his techno and rave roots, which had brought him success in the early 1990s. At the time of the album's release, Moby revealed that he had around 250 songs of varied styles, including electronic, ambient, and experimental pieces, for his next full studio album, but he was unsure as to what direction it should take. His early desire was to make a disco and dance-oriented album. He abandoned this idea for an album of ballads, and wrote between 30 and 40 songs before he decided that the time was not right for such a direction. Moby drew a large amount of inspiration for Hotel from his experiences in living in New York City. The music he heard DJs play in local bars, and the bands he saw perform live at various gigs, made him feel "like I was being given license to bask or wallow in my early influences." In a departure from his previous albums Play and 18, the album marks Moby's first since Ambient (1993) which does not include any vocal samples. Though the many songs that he had written did contain them, they did not interest him as much. Moby reasoned this down to the difficulty in learning the sampling function of the audio recording software on his computer, but nonetheless enjoyed writing the songs without