With the traditional record industry declining, you actually pointed the way forward for musicians when you licensed all 18 tracks from Play a decade ago, and helped re-monetise music. Did you know then that you'd help create a new blue-print for the internet generation music industry?

I remember the first time I played a show that paid me enough money so I could pay my rent for a week, and that was mind-boggling to me. My rent was $185 a month, so basically I played a show that paid me $100, and I thought, "Wow, this is amazing. I can actually buy soymilk, and I don't have to return cans to the A&P on the corner of 14th & Union Square", which is what I used to do to buy soymilk, because soymilk was a luxury.

There have been endless conversations of how to better monetize creative output, and how to increase market-share, and how to create or avail yourself of new media.

I hope this doesn't sound disingenuous because I think it's true: I feel, in many ways, like the luckiest weird musician on the planet, or the weirdest lucky musician on the planet, because I get to do everything: I play in punk rock bands, I play in blues bands, I occasionally do hip hop DJ sets, I go on tour with a full band and we play giant shows, I DJ and I play other people's records and get to take credit for them, we play acoustic shows, sometimes play chamber music, I get to write classical music for movies, I get to play weird experimental music... I don't know how I've fallen into my strange curriculum vitae.

It doesn't mean I do anything well. I don't think I'm particularly good at anything...

There was a week I was in Los Angeles, and I was finishing the new album, which was very electronic, I was playing a show with my high school punk rock band, and working on some film music and just doing all these different things, and I was just so happy to be able to do so many different styles of music. And none of them are particularly commercial.

This is going to sound so clichéd, but it's that Kris Kristofferson line: "Freedom' is just another word for nothing left to lose."

The more time a musician spends protecting their public image, the less fun they have. And the more time a musician spends worrying about a record release and worrying about all that stuff, the less interesting their records are going to be. So at this point, I'm lucky – I don't have to worry about anything. If someone calls me up and says, "Come play with our punk rock band," I go play with their punk rock band. It's this weird, random approach to making music and having no idea whether something is going to work or not, but hopefully I am enjoying the process.

Yes, a lot of times. I always prefer playing live with the band in a market first if possible. I am working with a great bunch of people for the Dubai show.

Your latest album, Destroyed, is the soundtrack to your touring. What's the one thing you never leave home without?

My camera - I love taking pictures. I've been a photographer since I was 10 years old. In the age of digital photography, being a photographer I feel like such a dilettante because anybody can be a photographer, but I still love it... I grew up with photography; my uncle was a photographer at The New York Times, so he would give me all his hand-me-down photo equipment.

As you wrote a lot of it in the dead of night, it's got a certain listless, tired but energetic feel about it which means it might not appeal to your pop fans. Is that something that might bother you, or do you record the music for yourself first and foremost, and then worry about the reaction?

I suffer from insomnia. So I'll be awake in a hotel room at four in the morning, and that's when most of the music on the record was written. So I would work in a hotel room at four in the morning writing music and then take the music back to New York, where I was living at the time, and try to finish things there.

There are a few billion pieces of music in the world; why would someone listen to one of mine? Just because I've made it? That's not reason enough for someone to listen to it. I try to work very hard to make albums that I love; hopefully, in the process, I make something that someone else will like, and then you figure out how to present it to people in a way that might increase the chance that they'll actually listen to it.

Your Destroyed tour is taking in 36 dates across 22 countries in a little over 2 months. That makes being a musician sound a lot like hard work - is writing on tour your way of coping with the travel and stress?

One of the upsides of insomnia is that you get more done. Clearly the downsides of insomnia are constant exhaustion, general irritability during the waking hours, a pervading fear of bedtime, diminished immune systems... So I guess the upside is you have more time during the day in which to get stuff done, even if you're always exhausted.

Rather than twiddling my thumbs during such protracted periods of wired somnambulance, however, I have come to embrace enforced wakefulness and turn it to my advantage – a process I call "repurposing insomnia." During my last world tour I carried a laptop Pro Tools setup with me, as well as a microphone and keyboard, and for the first time began to write and record music on the road. The bleary, after-hours statelessness of the touring regimen, and the awed solitude inherent in gazing out upon silent urban nightscapes, pervade my new compositions, imbuing them with an ambiguous, liminal quality, seemingly oscillating between ennui, consolation and epiphany.

Moby plays at the Trade Centre on Monday July 4, 7.30pm-late. Tickets from Dhs200, timeouttickets.com.