Richard Melville Hall known professionally as Moby, is an American musician, songwriter, record producer, DJ and animal rights activist. He has sold 20 million records worldwide. AllMusic considers him to be "among the most important dance music figures of the early 1990s, helping bring dance music to a mainstream audience both in the United States and the United Kingdom"

Richard Melville Hall was born September 11, 1965, in the neighborhood of Harlem in Manhattan, New York City. He is an only child of Elizabeth McBride (née Warner), a medical secretary, and James Frederick Hall, a chemistry professor, who died in a car crash while drunk when Moby was two. His father gave him the nickname Moby three days after his birth as his parents considered the name Richard too large for a newborn baby. The name was also a reference to the ancestry Hall says he was told by his family, though he is not directly related to Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick. Moby is distantly related to David Melville, inventor of the first United States-patented gas light system.