The promotion of « Dark Passion Play » continued in 2008 with the single « Bye Bye Beautiful ». This song is quite important because is opened the shows during the tour and also created a controversy since the lyrics were clearly about Tarja. The single was released on February 15th and, for the first time, Nightwish offered a remix of the song by DJ Orkidéa.

The band received many awards (Echo Awards in Germany, Emma Awards in Finland, golden records in several countries…) while being on their longest and hardest tour ever: about fourty shows between October 2007 and December 2007 and almost a hundred shows in 2008… The band felt the difficulty of playing three concerts in a row without a day off and they were exhausted when the tour ended. As far as Anette was concerned, she had a hard time delivering a satisfying singing because of her tired voice. Nightwish confessed in several interviews that they would not play so intensively in the future.

Nuclear Blast was determined to have success with "Dark Passion Play" (which they did since it became the album the most sold in the history of the band) and continued its promotion by releasing a fifth single – "The Islander". For this song, Nightwish shot a wonderful video in Lapland. The video was directed by Stobe Harju and Troy Donockley was invited to take part in the project. Tuomas had always loved this song and, had there not been a change of singers, he would have chosen to release it as a first single.

During summer 2008, the band played on many festivals and ended their huge tour in 2009 with a few shows in several capitals of the world.

In September, while « Dark Passion Play » had already been released in many versions (such as the collector edition which offers, for the first time, all the songs in an instrumental version), a new version was announced by Nuclear Blast: a « Special Deluxe Edition » which is nothing more than a pack "album + Amaranth single". In September also, a French rap artist called Tunisiano illegally used a sample from « Ever Dream » for his song "Je porte plainte" thus putting fuel on the fire between rap fans and metal fans. Van Canto, an a-capella cover band, covered – legally this time - "Wishmaster" in their album "Hero".

Despite their busy schedule, the members of the band did not forget about their side projects: Emppu continued playing guitar with Brother Firetribe (which played with Pain on tour – Pain which had been playing with Nightwish!), Marco sang on Northern Kings' new album entitled "Rethroned" and Anette recorded two tracks for Pain's album.

2009 ended with a new gift from Nuclear Blast which announced a live EP called "Made In Hong Kong (and in various other places)".